Back to Front: analyse af Nicola Barkers novelle

The short story Back to Front is written by the successful writer Nicola Barker and was first published in the collection The Three Button Trick from 2003. In this essay have I decided to focus on Nick and his character as well as the themes in the short story. I have chosen to focus on these things, because I find them important and fundamental and because the story would seem a bit boring, without such strong characters and themes

The main character, Nick, is a boy from a broken home. His lives alone with his mother and is her only child. Nick is special because his inner organs are inverted, but on the outside does he look like anyone else. Nick is constantly seeking for attention, and this is obviously because of his topsy-turvy organs: “Nick was set aside and he was special, but only on the inside, and that kind of difference can be very hard to live with.” He knows that he is different in a special way, but still he can’t get the attention that he so badly wants. In school he fails at getting the other children’s attention since they don’t really care about his inverted organs, so instead of being the centre of attention, he is bullied and teased – first by being called names, but at last by being completely ignored. He got therefore the exact opposite of what he wanted: “He became blank. A nil. A nothing.” After failing in the school, he tries to gets his mother’s attention but she remarries with her boyfriend Thomas Siswele and therefore Nick loses his last bit of attention from his mother. In a desperate try to get her attention back, he turns himself in at the police station for several crimes such as shoplifting and arson, even though he hasn’t committed them. But also this fails, because the police don’t believe him. At some point during his lies he meets a real criminal, Lyndon, in a police cell. Nick is trying to take the responsibility of an armed robbery at the H. Samuel’s Jeweller, but this is really Lyndon’s crime. Lyndon feels offended by this and ends up stabbing Nick in his chest. Lyndon is like Nick – he needs attention, because even though he has been trying to convince the police of his innocence for days, he doesn’t want Nick to take the credit. Nick ends up at the hospital. Any normal person would easily have survived the stab, but because of Nick’s inverted organs, is the stab much more critical. When he is at the hospital he eyed a chance to get attention, so he doesn’t tell the doctor about is special organs. He is willing to give up his own life to become ‘one of a kind’ and the centre of attention.