Analyse af 'Pill Pusher' om fordomme og social klasse

Through all my life I have been told to not judge a book by its cover. I have had this sentence in the back of my head through all my experiences in life. That is because I easily could judge the people walking by me on the streets, at work or in the train on my way to school. But I am guessing that my judgement is wrong most of the time, and I know that I am not the only one thinking like this. So, when Carolyn A. Drake wrote “Pill Pusher” published in 2016, she wanted to emphasize the problem of judging too quickly, and the narrator of the story is the perfect representative of exactly this.

The story starts in the middle of events, also called in medias res. It opens with the narrator realizing that she has made a $70,000 mistake. This means that she is unsatisfied and disappointed with her decision of taken a student loan “just” to work in retail. She has after all studied pharmacy for six years. The narrator is situated behind the counter in a pharmacy telling a customer, who she calls Bug Eyes, to wait in line. Bug Eyes’ impatience towards the narrator and the narrator’s lack of excess energy causes resentment between the characters. This resentment is a foreshadow for their argument which is to come later in the story. Through the story the narrator is trying to stay professional and polite towards Bug Eyes, but on the inside, she immediately forms an impression and thinks sarcastically “this is an important lady, who has fantastically important things to tend to today” such as “just” buying medicine for her daughter’s cold. She keeps bouncing from her nice and polite outer voice, to her mean and judgmental inner voice. The climax in the story is when the narrator becomes so angry that she yells at Bug Eyes in front of the whole store. She did not care that Bug Eyes wanted to file a complaint, until she realizes there may be serious consequences of her actions. As their argument are at the highest point, the narrator searches for Bug Eyes’ doctor’s number and sees that there are notes with all her previous prescriptions. She can see that Bug Eyes’ daughter suffers from leukemia and not from a cold, and at it is at this point that the narrator has realized that she has judged a little too quickly and therefore starts to feel bad. To be nice the narrator offers a tip to help with the daughter’s nausea and the customer thanks the narrator and apologizes to her. The conflict between the two is therefore solved and the story ends as a closed short story, because they most likely will never have this argument again.