Everyone has at least once in their life experienced loneliness. It can leave a person feeling empty, isolated and unwanted. Since it is one of the deepest and most profound experiences that we have as human beings, it reveals that one of our most important needs is to love and be loved. But where will you get that love from if you do not have family or friends? One of the harmful things about loneliness is that it is easy to get into but very hard to get out of. Jackie Kay addresses some of these problems in her short-story Mrs Vadnie Marlene Sevlon from 2013. The reader gets an insight into the mind of a delusional and lonely woman. To handle her loneliness, she creates a fantasy world to distance herself to the harsh reality.
The narrator of the story is a third person narrator. Through this narrator, the reader gets a limited access to the thoughts of the main character Vadnie Marlene Sevlon. It is not an omniscient narrator since the narrator only describes what the character thinks but not how she feels. Therefore, Vadnie is described indirectly by her actions and not directly by the narrator. For instance, when she sits in a graveyard and imagines her own death: But even so her mind would wander off, as it often did, to imagining her own death. Even though she is not described directly as being depressed, it is still clear to the reader since she sits alone in a graveyard and imagines her own death in detail as if she aches for it. Even though it is a third person narrator, the narrative voice still reflects Vadnie’s personality since the author uses both indirect and direct speech to describe what Vadnie’s imaginary world looks like: ‘Oh, he works longs hours; he’s an electrician you see …,’ Vadnie would say, whenever she got a chance. It gives the reader an impression of Vadnie as a confused and disoriented woman.
Det er gratis at oprette en konto