Analyse af 'A Fortune'

A fortune is about a man who is a pickpocket. He started pickpocketing when he was only five years old, which says a lot about him as a person. He is snatching people’s wallets from them, without being discovered. The man has a boss who he gives the money to, and then he will get a couple of bills from him. The narrator tells that he has a mother who is an ugly lady who always cries. He gives his mother credit for trying to make him an honest boy. Once she cried because she didn’t want him to be like his stinking, rotting lout-of-a-father. We also hear about his uncle who is playing a drunken Santa Claus every Christmas Eve. The family is not normal. One day he sees this boy who reminds him of himself. The little boy is out of a rich family, and he seems unhappy. The man is stealing the little boy’s father’s wallet. When the wallet is empty for money he is going back to the place he took it. There he sees the little boy standing all alone and looking sad. He is taking him home and shows him his box full of paper from fortune cookies. The boy is very impressed and he stays the night. The man is showing a lot of feelings to the boy and tells him that he is tremendous. The next day he is following the little boy home to his rich father, but the boy is just standing looking at the pickpocket, without moving his face.The narrator can be characterized as a bad man because he is a pickpocket. When you steal things from other people, then you are not a good person. The reason for his bad personality could be his childhood. The mother and father do not seem normal, and so do the uncle. The mother is described as a person who cries all the time, the father is described as a stinking and rotting person and the uncle is drunk all the time. It seems like his childhood has been very bad, because he had needed love and attention from his parents and his family. Because of this missing love and attention he turned out to be a pickpocket, because he hasn’t learned how he should behave by his parents. To him it’s normal to steal other people’s wallets. But this man hasn’t only a bad side, because when he meets the little boy, you see a good side of him. He begins to share his experiences with other peoples, who seem to be like him. The little boy seems to need love from his father, because the father is only thinking about money and work, so he is forgetting his little son. The narrator can feel this, and then he wants to make him happy. So this is the meaning with the title “A fortune”. The father’s fortune is not his little son, it is his money. When the narrator was a little boy, he wasn’t his parents’ fortune and he needed love just like the little boy. So he created his own little fortune, to pickpocketing, and to get money. But when he meets this little boy, he finds out that money isn’t everything. He wants to make this little boy to his fortune, to give him love and attention, to show him that he is tremendous. When he is following him home, he feels good; he feels that he had made a good thing in his life. He got sympathy with this little boy, whose father doesn’t give him attention. And because of the fathers missing love and attention, he thinks that he shouldn’t have his wallet back, because he don’t know what a fortune he has anyway, his son and not his money. So the main theme of this story is money and love. What means the most, and what would you call your fortune? The money where you can buy anything you want, except from love? Or love where you can have a lot of good times with people you love. You can have both of it, but the question is what you prioritize the most. In this story there are different meanings about it, and that is what the narrator tries to tell from his point of view. He is a first person, who doesn’t know anything about the other persons, which makes him a non-omniscient narrator. So it’s not sure that everything he writes is true, because he doesn’t know everything about the father and the little boy. He could exaggerate and lie if he wanted to, but he just seems like a reliable person, because he tells his life story. He is describing the characters directly at the way they seem to be. So this whole story is like a life story from the narrator’s side, where he describes the maybe biggest time in his life. The time where he finds out which things there mean most to him, and the time where he founds out what he need to do with his life. The little boy changed a lot of things inside him, because he reminded him so much of himself as a little boy. They both needed love and attention.This text could be put into a perspective to the text “The Ants” by Caryl Churchill. That text is about a little boy whose parents is about to getting divorced, and then they forget all about him. He needs their love and attention, but they are busy thinking about themselves. If they don’t start to think about him, then he maybe will end up like the narrator and be a pickpocket. You have to remember your children, because they are your fortune.