Analyse af Peter Cartys novelle 'Yellow'

The short story Yellow was written by Peter Carty and published in Neonlit, Quartet Books in 1999. The story is about a magazine publisher Jon, who lives in London. Jon is fed up with life due to a lot of mental and alcoholic issues. One day Jon’s magazine editors force him to take a learn-to-scuba-dive trip to Egypt, where his traumatizing relationship with water manifests. He ends up attending the diving school even though he doesn’t like it. To avoid confrontation he isolates himself – to which he in the end sees death as the only solution.

At the beginning, the title may seem a bit clueless, because what is yellow really? But as your read the text, you find out that the term yellow has another meaning too. The colour Yellow is a slang word for a coward, that is , someone who is not particularly brave.

“He forced himself to set off for the diving school and tried to ignore an inner voice. ‘You’re yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow’. These compulsive thoughts prevent Jon from living his life and they constantly remind him that he is nothing and that nobody cares for him.

The text is written as an alternation between internal and external perspective. The internal perspective lets us see the events from the ‘eyes’ of the narrator. The external gives us a perspective of being like a ‘fly on the wall’ only observing the events of the protagonist. The story is told chronologically and at the beginning of the story, the protagonist is told in second person, while as the story progresses, the author switches over to a 3rd person.