Analyse af Astrid Blodgetts novelle 'Ice Break'

Ice Break Life can be a hard journey for some people. Traumatizing experiences will not affect a child the same way as an adult, because children do not always understand the meaning of such situations. The short story Ice Break is written by Astrid Blodgett, and is an example on how the young girl, named Dawn, reacts when she is going through a hard time in her life. The short story Ice Break is told by a first person narrator, and the reader sees the story from Dawn’s point of view. The main character is Dawn, who is approximately 13 years old. Even though the writer does not mention Dawns age the reader gets the impression that she is around 12-13 years old, since she has just started working as a babysitter and consider 5 dollars a lot of money. Dawn’s family contains of herself, her parents and her two siblings Marla and Janie. Dawn and her father do not seem to have a close relationship “I didn’t want to be alone with Dad. He was always grouchier when it was just him and me. He was scary when he got mad”. Dawn is forced to go on a fishing trip with her father, but because of her awkward relationship with him she tries to persuade her younger sister Janie to join them by giving her 5 dollars. Dawn, Janie and their father are looking for their Uncle Rick on the trip, but suddenly the ice underneath them breaks. Janie and the father drown, but Dawn survives because her father saved her before he died. Ice Break starts in media res; “We’re a long way out on the lake when the ice breaks”. This start makes the reader interested in knowing the end of the story. This is the climax in the story, which makes the tension high through the whole short story. The short story’s storyline changes quickly after the start: “Earlier, Dad had asked Mom to come”. The short story is structured in two chronological stories, one is a flashback and the other is present time. The reader gets more challenged by this form of structure, which makes the text more interesting to read. The short story is little on details, which means that the reader has to read between the lines. The reader gets to know the characters through their actions, instead of getting it explained by the writer. Dawn and her mother is trying to deal with the fact that they have lost someone they loved very deeply, and therefor is grief a theme in the short story. Dawn and her mother react different to the situation. Dawn’s mother is crushed, but she keeps trying to see the positive side and she won’t say to the news what she really felt about the trip in the beginning and use “I told you so”, because of the awful circumstances. It seems like Dawn don’t fully understand the situation, which is shown when Dawn keep on saying to her mother that she should say what she thought about the trip instead for trying to cover for her dad: “Mom said, over and over, at least he was doing something he loved. I wanted her to say the other part (…) that she was angry with Dad for going”. Another theme in the short story is the mind of a child. Dawn is only a child, and her mind is therefor very immature. Dawn focuses on the makeup on her little sister and father instead of realizing that the funeral will be the last time she sees them: “Janie’s face had make-up all over. (…) They even put make-up on Dad” . Dawn cannot understand the fact, that they are dead. She keeps thinking that they soon will wake up, and everything will go back to being normal again: “I looked at their chests for the longest time, waiting for them to move up and down”. Dawn is not mature enough to know how to react to this situation, which makes her reaction at the funeral almost without feelings. The short story also contains the theme ‘family relationships’, and the short story shows how the relationships in a family can develop with time. Dawn feels she has awkward relationship with her father, but at the same time Dawn loves him deeply. They never told each other how they really felt, and now it is too late to changed. The father shows his love for Dawn by saving her in the car instead of saving him self: “Dad unclips his seatbelt, flings his body onto mine, and rams his shoulder against the door. He’s sitting on top of me now, all of him, pinning my legs to the seat”. The message in the short story is never to take anything for granted, because you can lose everything in a blink of an eye and then it is to late to change. Besides that is the story an example on how important it is to say how you feel about the people you love while they are with you.