Analyse af 'Insignificant Gestures' af Jo Cannon

Insignificant Gestures by Jo Cannon is a short story, which tells us about a British doctor who has been working at an African hospital. He loses a certain person who he has feelings for. This person is called Celia. She is a servant at the narrator’s house. She gets beat up by her boyfriend and the narrator does not do anything special – he leaves the job to the doctors at the capital city hospital. Celia’s death makes him regret it so badly that he is afraid of thinking about it. This is the pivot of the short story. In the following analysis and interpretation I will be giving a characterization of the narrator, expounding the relationship between the narrator and Celia, exposing the narrator’s error of judgement and telling the significance of time and place.

The story is a first person teller. The narrator is an 18 years old man who has worked as a district health officer in Africa and now works as a psychiatrist after he returned home. We get to know that he worked long hours, which shows how attracted he is to his job and how busy he is. He is a regretful man because he says that he would do things differently if he could: “If I could peel back time, I would do things differently. But you don’t get second chance”. . The narrator seems to be a closed man because he never talked about his feelings until he met the black woman in Britain. He stopped working as a doctor and drawing pictures after Celia’s death because they reminded him of her which he did not want. If he was an open man and shared his experiences others than maybe he would continue his life as it was before Celia’s death. The narrator seems to be a man who does not want to look down on lower class people: “Servants were a symbol of inequality and exploitation, and I didn’t need one”. We get to know that he only took Celia on as servant because she needed a job – her family depended on her. He did not let her make hard works. He took self care of making the meals.The main character likes to draw pictures. It looks like he has been drawing in a long period because he says: “I marvelled that with only three years of schooling she could draw so well”.I think that the way the narrator tells the story is kind of messy because he is going back and forth in time and the reader realizes that a bit late, which means that it confuses the reader. The topic always changes. It is as if while tells something he remembers something else and begins telling about that. He also makes use of describing adjectives and/or adverbs such as “black shadow” and “strange buzzing”, which make us get more detailed picture of the story.