Analyse af novellen 'Killing Lizards'

Everybody has different ways to get on with frustrations and issues in life. It doesn’t always go the way you’ve planned, but still you’ve got to bring the positive out of the negative. Attention is a human need as well as the need of feel loved by your family. The short story “Killing Lizards” is about a boy, who doesn’t get enough attention of his parents. This lack of attention is very hard for him, but in the end he may revenge his irresponsible family.

Since the family moved from England to Africa, Gavin’s personal stage is grown lower. He dreams about his sister and father’s death and about moving back to England with his mother. The dreams allude to a kind of loneliness and need of attention. On page two it says that the dream repeats itself and Gavin got more frustrated by the truth and more dissatisfied with the way things were. This dream about being an only child clearly frustrates the twelve-year-old boy and he doesn’t know how to take stand on this problem. In fact he doesn’t hate his sister or his father, but his need of feel loved by his mother is taking over his thoughts. These thoughts only grow larger when he doesn’t get the love he wants and needs to receive. The distance between his mother and him had grown larger when Amanda went to boarding school in England. “He used to like his sister but since her fifteenth birthday she had changed. When she had come out on holiday last Christmas she had hardly played with him at all. She preferred going shopping with her mother.”(Lines 9, 10, 11, 12) Gavin finds it difficult to see how his sister grows from him and how she prefers going shopping with his mother. They used to have a special relationship to each other but now Amanda grows up she doesn’t bother about her brother as she did once. Their mother doesn’t treat them the same way as well. This difference of treatment makes Gavin jealous and has a bad influence on the boy. It has a negative effect on the way he’s thinking and he gets cooped up with himself.