'On the Beach' af Brett Easton Ellis, analyse

Illness can be a difficult thing to handle for everybody, especially for family and those who stand the ill person closest. It is not up to the single individual who gets ill and who doesn’t. When people have a hard time, they try to comprehend the reality that everyone is going to die at some point, some later than other. So, having an ill family member or friend can result in a hard time which need to be realized. The shot story “On the Beach,” by Brett Easton Ellis is about this young couple where the female is very ill, having a hard time with partying, drugs and bad company.

The story is about the narrator and his ill girlfriend being on vacation in Malibu where the girlfriend’s parents live. Malibu is a wealthy beach city located in Los Angeles and requires a lot of money to stay there for the visitors. “We have been on the beach every day for the last three weeks now. It's all she wants to do.” (l. 44-45), The narrators girlfriend says. She just wants to spend time at the beach and nothing else, almost like she wanted to die at that exact place. It can be argued that when the narrator’s girlfriend is sitting staring right over the horizon, she is imagining how it is to be dead, and almost watching into her own death as if it was the future. The girlfriend that sits at the beach most of the time, is connected to the title of the short story “On the beach,” and already when we read this title we directly connect it to something nice a comfortable witch it is not in this case. Because when hear about a beach we assume that it is something nice but in this story they kind of put death and a beach together by placing this ill girlfriend on it.