Analyse af Robin Blacks novelle '...Divorced, Beheaded, Survived'

How you deal with death during childhood and later on, is the theme of Robin Black’s short story “…Divorced, Beheaded, Survived”.

The story is told by Sarah, as a first-person narrator. She remembers her childhood, the loss of her brother Terry, and how this has had an impact on the rest of her life and her view on death.

The death’s of King Henry VIII’s wives was a game invented by one of the children behind Robin’s childhood home, Johnny Sanderson. Every afternoon after school Sarah, Terry, and their friends, Jeff Mandelbaum, Molly Denham and Johnny Sanderson were acting out this game of death in Sarah and Terry’s backyard.

Especially the beheading of Anne Boleyn, Lady Anne, the second wife of King Henry VIII was a success. Everyone wanted to play Lady Anne, however Sarah’s brother, Terry was the most convincing playing that role. During the game the children would recite the rhyme to remember the fates of Henry VIIII’s six wives: “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.”

However the game came to a sudden end when Sarah’s brother, Terry, died. Sarah jumps back and forth in time, with flashbacks to her childhood and back to the present time telling us about her own children, Mark and Coco and her life, now thirty years after Terry’s death.