Analyse af 'Staring me in the face' af Katherine Mansfield

Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. ~ By Katherine Mansfield

Staring me in the face is a short but sweet story about a topic which many lives are influenced by. The topic has always been a serious matter and probably will be for years to come. The fact that there are children out there, right now, who don’t know their father, or their mother for the matter, is bitter bite to swallow and understand for me who has lived my whole life with both parents and both sets of grandparents. I will never be able to comprehend what these people have gone through and are still going through, not knowing one’s roots. They literally don’t know where one half of them is descending from.

The story tells us from a first person’s point of view of how the narrator came about knowing a new person and how she thought he could be her unknown father. In the beginning she finds him a bit weird but as she continuously bumps into him, once even literally, she realises that they have a lot in common. Then suspicion about their biological relationship slowly creeps into her thoughts. She asks about his past and finds out several similarities between his past and what small facts she knows about her father. He tells her he has a son and she is disappointed. When he asks about her disappointment, she tells about how she had thought they were father and daughter. He tries to let her down gently and in the end they both agree that they don’t need a biological relationship to be friends.