Analyse af novellen 'How the Nurse Feels'

“How the Nurse Feels” is short story which is taking place in the present of Winetka in the USA. The story’s main character is the 15-year-old Tess who is an ordinary teenager living with both her parents. Her father is a minister who always seems to be perpetually frightened but nobody knows by what. Tess’ mother owns a fabric store, which she hopes that Tess will take over some day. She also has a tendency to read volumes into even short sentences Tess says.

Tess is in the play at her high school where she is playing Juliet’s nurse in Shakespeare’s famous “Romeo and Juliet” and the theatre group is Tess’ main interests, but it is also a way for her to escape from her own life and try feeling what it is like to become somebody else. P. 5 ll. 146 “I have to feel what it’s like in somebody else’s skin.” She likes to act so she can be another person with a different personality and who is in a different situation than herself. She uses the acting to escape from reality and then uses the fiction in the play to learn about other people and the thoughts and feelings they have. There is also an Apothecary in “Romeo and Juliet” and it is a student called Tiger who plays him. Tiger does not have a good reputation; in fact Tess is seeing him as this bad boy who is being forced into the school play by the principal in hope of straighten him out by the end of the play. There are also rumours of Tiger selling marijuana at school ground. Some how these rumours and stories only make Tess even more interested in him. P. 2 ll. 26-27 “I imagine I can feel his breath in my ear, coming through the phone.” That is how Tess describes their very innocent weather conversation over the phone. And at the time they did not even know each other. So it can only mean Tess has a bit of a crush on Tiger. Suddenly, short after their conversation, Tiger disappears. His disappearance makes Tess insecure about her part as Juliet’s nurse. She does not feel the character as she calls it. By the opening night she still has not got in contact with her character or Tiger but when Mr and Mrs De Soto, Tiger’s parents, show up Tess notices a thing about Mrs De Soto. P. 5. ll. 161-162. “Mrs De Soto’s hands are moving fast, the fingers stretching out stiff then collapsing back into fits.” Tess also notice that when Mrs De Soto enters the stage she is standing in the exact spot Tess was in when she was rehearsing as the nurse who just found out that Juliet was dead. Tess finds out that she can use Mrs De Soto’s movements in her character as the nurse because just as Mrs De Soto has lost a child so has the nurse. In the beginning of this story we hear that the nurse once had a child called Susan but she died so now she saw Juliet as her own daughter. Now Tess can use Mrs De Soto’s mime and body language to now exactly how the nurse felt when she found Juliet dead. So Mrs De Soto is a symbol of the nurse and her feelings and thoughts. I believe that the themes in this short story are how reality can effect fiction and vice versa. Because Tess uses the reality to find inspiration to her character and simultaneously she learns from it, so you can say that the fiction also affects her in some way.