Analyse af Marc Johnsons essay 'Sweetie'

I have been commissioned to analyze the essay Sweetie written by Marc Johnson. It is an essay with the theme of evil as the over-theme. Evil can be many things and you cannot always tell if people have something evil in them. Nurture and Nature evil are two major factors when it comes to evil acts. Because it is important to point out that there are no evil people, but poorer environments and upbringing that can influence a person's evil actions.

Narration and point of view

In the text, we have the mother as a first-person narrator as we see it from her perspective. Example (line 1) “I was so surprised to receive your letter asking about my son”. It is easy for us to know that she is the first-person narrator because she says “I” when she talks about what she does or sees. The mother is together with her son, the two main characters which make it easy for us to identify with the mother.

The narrator type is limited omniscient and subjective. It is limited because the first person knows a lot of the things that are going on but not everything as the son is hiding something from the mother. Example (line 61-65), “about ten o´clock the next morning he came in and asked me to cook him breakfast, he said he had worked up an appetite out hunting, he said he was sorry for being gone all night, he said they had driven a long way to get to this place. He sounded strange. He was nervous.”