Analyse af Graham Swifts novelle 'Our Nicky's Heart'

Our Nicky’s Heart is an English short story written by Graham Swift.

At first you get the impression that it’s a third person narrator, but on page two an “I” comes in, and then you hear that it’s a first person narrator, and it’s Nicky’s big brother Mark that tells the story from his point of view.

It seems like the mother of the four boys is the most emotionally connected to Nicky, because she feels that he is the daughter she never had. When Nicky dies, Mark is only telling about the grief of the mother, and how hard it is to her that Nicky is gone. We don’t really hear the father’s or the brother’s reactions to his death.

Nicky were unlike anyone of his other tree brothers or his father. He was the latecomer and he didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of his father and be a farmer. He preferred his mother’s present, because the mother gave him everything. When Nicky was seventeen, he bought a Yamaha. Something that any of his brothers never was allowed to do. And that the Yamaha was the thing that killed him is the irony of destiny, and it was the mother that didn’t say anything to Nicky when he bought it. So all the spoiling from the mother resulted in his death.