Analyse af Eileen Merrimans novelle 'I dare you'

Life as a teenager is not always easy. It is a time filled with frustrations, love, new things and crossed boundaries. Since forever, teenagers around the globe have tried themselves with stupid things like drugs and been pushed to do things they might not would have done without the art of peer pressure from friends and wrong surroundings.

This exact subject is the main subject in the short story “I dare you” by Eileen Merriman, where we in the beginning are introduced to two girls on a playground swinging on swings. I assume that the two girls, Jane and Carrie, are close friends since they both have matching leather friendship bracelets; “Her leather friendship bracelet, the twin of mine…” (p.1 ll.9-10).

One of the two girls, Jane feels unconfident furthermore she cannot hold herself from comparing herself to Carrie; “I was jealous about Carrie’s perfect skin, her coltish legs, her movie-star name. I was just Jane, plain Jane, the girl no one looked twice at.” So, Jane envies Carrie along with that you can almost hear the sadness in her voice through the text when she says “I´m just Jane”, it creates some kind of hierarchy where Carrie is pictured to be higher ranked than Jane.