Analyse af Roddy Doyles novelle 'Smile'

There are many challenges of being a young boy in a group of friends. There are certain expectations of how to handle different situations, how to behave towards the adults and how to take responsibility and stand up for yourself as a young boy.

In the short story Smile, we meet a boy with similar problems. The story is written by Roddy Doyle, an Irish novelist, and it was published in 2016 in the magazine Granta. The Magazine of New Writing.

The short story is about a young boy named Victor Forde, who has just started in secondary school at an all-boy Catholic school. The events are seen from his point of view as a first-person narrator and the reader gets an insight into his thoughts and feelings. The short story is one long flashback that stretches over 3 years, where the protagonist starts as a 13-year-old and in the end is 16 years old. In the text, there is much dialogue, which provides a more vivid picture of the events and gives the reader a direct insight into how the different characters handle the various situations. The story is therefore written chronologically and the story is told by Victor when he is an adult. Victor is a restricted narrator since we only know what he knows and he is not as reliable as he could be because of his limited point of view.