'Champagne Flight': analyse af Jill Norris' novelle

Growing old is a mandatory thing everyone will have to face at some point in their life, but does growing old always equal growing up? This is not the case in the short story that takes place in a plane across the United States, “Champagne Flight”, written by the author Jill Norris in 1982. By dealing with multiple interesting themes like growing up, the story follows a naïve and young girl’s visit through the terrifying truths of adulthood and her general discoveries and realizations about life itself.

“Champagne Flight” is a short story told from the main character’s point of view. This is called a first-person narrator. They are a limited narrator, who only has access to their own thoughts and feelings. This is proved throughout the entire story, for example in the very beginning: “I was sixteen and trying to be older, and I was just about to make my first airplane flight!”, and on page 2, line 12: “Suddenly I felt very young.”. By using the pronouns “I” and “my” and the phrase “I felt”, the quotes show, that it is a first-person- and limited narrator.

This narrator is an unnamed, sixteen-year-old girl, which is made clear in the first quote from before, wearing a suit consisting of “a grey skirt and a boxy jacket” (p. 1, l. 12). We are told her hair is slicked back, making her appear older than she is, which is her exact goal: To appear older and more mature. After she declines the offer of a drink earlier, because she is afraid of being “pegged as a teenager”, and she “wasn’t ready to lose the feeling of being grown-up”(p. 2, l. 13), she is offered wine with her lunch, and quickly responds, as a grown, mature woman would: “Oh, red, please!”, to keep seeming grown by behavior as well as looks. While floating in the glory of being an adult, she meets a woman named Serena Sinclair, who gives her insight to, what adulthood actually brings, not only the good parts. This makes her realize how naive she had been and how she no longer wants to be grown and is “glad to get back to being sixteen”.