Analyse af 'In the National Gallery'

Getting older is a natural thing about life. When you get older you maybe forget how it was to be young, but being young and in love for the first time maybe have had such a great impact on you that you’ll never forget it - no matter how old you get. Love is a weird thing that no one will never ever understand. This short story “In the National Gallery” by Doris Lessing shows two kinds of love. At first it shows the love of art and then the love that lasts forever and burns in ones soul. The text introduces an older man, who suddenly gets back in time and experiences some of the feelings he had back then, when he was in love for the first time. The story also deals with themes as youth, vitality and the gap between generations. The story takes place in the National Gallery where our first-person narrator, an art-interested woman, is sitting next to the main character, an older man on a bench in front of a painting made by the British painter Stubbs. There is also a younger man who doesn’t share the same interest for paintings. The younger man says: “You can’t make a silk purse out of me, I keep telling you.” This shows that he maybe is in some kind of relation with the older man. Even though the older man is sharing his passion for paintings with him, the younger man is restless and later quickly walks towards to exit, which lies just after the French eighteenth century. You can actually say that he is leaving the old man in the past 1700 hundreds room. The old man is kind of stocked in the past, while the younger man is on his way to the future. Suddenly a group of French schoolgirls are entering the room and generations meet. The gap between generations is especially shown when these girls are entering. The girls are very attractive and neither the narrator nor the older man is able to take their eyes off of them. They are behaving very energetic and loudly too. Especially one of the French girls does, she is the leader of the group. She is so delicate and beautiful with her dark hair that the man gets reminded of his first love. The narrator is having a conversation with him, while the French girl is sleeping right beside him. He tells about his childhood, he was twelve years old and in love with a girl just like her. He is taking back in time when he looks at her, because she not only reminds him of the past and the girl who broke his heart back then, but also of the vitality he had when he was younger. He maybe wishes this vitality back. As attracted as he is to the French girl, he also is to the painting. But she sees right through him. The narrator explains this by saying: “Young things do not see the elderly or middle-aged”. (l. 146). Just as he was invisible to the girl from his youth, he is invisible to the young French girl. There is a resemblance between this girl and the horse in the painting of Stubbs. She gets compared with a cat, but the wildness of the horse is like the French girl. She also seems powerful and untainted just like the horse. Because of this big attraction the horse maybe also gets a kind of symbol of sex. The man is taken away by her in the same way as he is by the painting. Maybe that’s why he is following her when they are leaving. Her potency is so strong, and he is longing so much for this feeling of love and youth that he can’t resist it and he can’t let her go. Dorris Lessing uses a first-person narrator which means that we see everything through the eyes of the narrator. We only know what she knows. We never get to know what the other characters actually are thinking, even though the narrator by having a conversation with the main character is trying to figure out what he is thinking. The conversation is the closest we come to know how the older man feels. By using this technique it makes us feel as if the text is both objective and subjective. The narrator is an observer. She is just sitting in the gallery observing what’s going on and she is analyzing the people around her, how they express themselves and behave. This objective point of view makes the story a little mysterious. Still the story also has a subjective point of view, because we get to know some of her opinions - especially about the French girls. Doris Lessing is however good at hiding the narrators unreliability.