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

Innocence! That is a child’s key feature; it makes them free to play war, a most horrifying topic, in their backyard after school and turn it into hours of excitement. They haven’t become acquainted with the real-life horrors of a battlefield, and that is just to give an example. Generally are death and diseases, which is an essential part of life, something all parents want to protect their children form experiencing, but the question then lies, what length should parents when go to do so? In the short story “... Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” from 2010, shares the author Robin Black the story of the Sarah who first handed witnesses her big brother, Terry, die at a young age and how her curtain of innocence gets lifted from her eyes. Later in Sarah’s life, she experiences a similar situation, but this time it is her son, Mark, who is about to discover reality. Now Sarah conflict is how to react. Is she wiling to talk to Mark and teach him the serious aspects of life or should she try to ignore the question in order to let him keep his innocence a little while further? In the short story we follow Sarah who is married with Lyle and a mother of two children, Mark and Coco. When Sarah was 10 years old her big brother, Terry, died of sickness and because of her early age have never experienced death before. This makes Terry’s death a great shock to her, “Terry got sick, and then sicker, and then got better for a little bit, but then died in ’74, which shocked me when it happened” (l. 48-50), but she follows up in the next line, drawing a parallel to Molly’s axe “…but now, thirty years later, it seems to have been as inevitable a conclusion as the strike of Molly’s axe” (l. 50-51) and referring back to the game of King Henry VIII and his second wife they played with there neighbor where all the children was most fascinated of the character Anne Boleyn, and they fight over who gets to play executed, “... the beheading was just too good not to fight over” (l. 13-14). As absurd as it may seem, the children finds the beheading to the most exciting part of their games. This changes when Terry gets sick and eventually dies and it clearly shows their innocence being exposed to death in real life. So much so they stop playing at their house and Sarah becomes isolated “He stopped being a boy who would throw himself into anything that seemed like fun. And one by one the other children began avoiding us” (l. 103-105). Even 30 years later we still see Sarah concerned about Terry’s death and the last thing see want is to relive it again even to the point of superstition “- we had two years apart, Tarry and I. And maybe it was superstition that made me wait that extra stretch of time before getting pregnant again” (l. 60-61) see even puts the only picture of Terry in a drawer to protect Mark and Coco’s innocence. ”It just seemed to me to be too hard on the children, too hard on Mark particularly to have that happy boy face smiling down, and to know what had happened to that other boy” (l. 136-138). Mark and Coco are now 16 and 12 years old and Sarah knows that their years of innocence are over when she talks about Mark and Coco us to playing in the garden. But Mark’s innocence is lost when he hears about his friend’s death. He reacts parallel to Sarah 30 years ago by isolating himself and not wanting to speak to anybody. When Mark finally asks Sarah, how it was when his uncle Terry died, Sarah is forced to talk about her “it was terribly, terribly hard” (l. 163)The short story uses a structure that makes it feel very personal, many flashbacks that draws parallels between the past and the present and with the first person narrator we are presented to Sarah’s words and thoughts “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about all the ways we try to protect our children. And ourselves” (l. 65-66) this gives the reader an idea of Sarah’s emotions and concerns. The theme of Robin Black’s short story is death and how it can hunt people, which are shown in the jumps of past and present. Because of the traumatizing experiences in her childhood, Sarah has done a lot of thinking about how to protect her own children because she knows how it changes everything for a child. Some uses of symbolism in the short story are manifested in objects. For instance the backyard in the story is a symbol of innocent childhood. Here children can play freely with no restriction and no concept of death, clarified in the excitement of execution. Another symbolic object is the picture of Terry, which sees as a symbol of her unwillingness to speak of death and tries to hide it away. The dresser drawer becomes a symbol of her unconsciousness, which is forced to be unlocked. And the title of the short story “... Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” which is a symbol of Sarah’s conflict and also the moral in the story. From Sarah and Terry are separated when Terry got ill -“divorced”, to Terry death -“beheaded” and last to Sarah trying to live with her loss -“survived” continue with our own lives even if we lose our loved ones. Robin Black’s short story teaches us that we must never be afraid of talking about death. The narration shows us how Sarah loses her childish innocence and how death becomes a terrible thing that you don’t talk about. When she becomes a mother she wants to protect her children against the same experience. But you can’t keep your children protected from neither life nor death and as it turns out Sarah is forced to introduce Mark to the terrible truth. It teaches us that the only thing that helps us overcome death is being able to talk about it.