Growing up is difficult. Everybody has a dream, a fantasy of what they want to be when they grow up. Everybody has someone they look up to and want to be like. A doctor, a singer, a fireman. The wishing list can be very long. But how many of these wishes come true when you grow older? How many people have turned out the way they pictured themselves when they were children? Not many – and that is why you can ask yourself this question: What changes? What makes people give up their childhood dreams? In “the Whaler” an Irish short story, this theme is illustrated.
The Whaler takes place in Ireland in a beautiful nature environment with hills and fields. The setting is presented very idyllic and is characterized as a town-land. The story begins on a May morning, where the narrator of the story sees his childhood hero, the whaler, defecating.
The narrator’s reaction to this situation tells the reader something about the narrator and the point of his life he is in. The narrator gets very embarrassed and he finds it extremely uncomfortable to be standing next to the whaler, while he wipes himself after defecating. This is of course not a pleasant situation for anyone, but by the way it is described the situation reflects the narrator as being very innocent: “ I was too pained to watch but too embarrassed to move away”. He does not know what to do with himself so he just stays with the whaler because of his embarrassment. We do not hear of the narrator’s age but this innocence indicates that he is still a child at least at this point of the story. He also has a lot of the characteristics, which are often compared with childhood. For example he is very sensitive and even more imaginative: “I had read on whaling. And they froze my blood and boiled my imagination” (p. 1, lines 12-13). From this quote you can also see that he reads books and that he is interested in whaling and because of that he seems clever. Adding to this he also says that he likes geography.
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