Analyse af Christine Addlers novelle 'The Bench'

Being young and getting pregnant is not easy. Decisions have to be made. Having nobody’s support, but most of all, being alone and end up like a duck swimming alone. But all it takes is a walk around the lake.

”The Bench” by Christine Addler is about a confused woman we do not get the name of. The girl in the story gets pregnant by a boy she does not really know and she is not interested in having the baby. We get to know, that she is eight weeks in to her pregnancy and she does not want to have the baby. She also has her “personal” bench, which is her favourite bench and nobody else’s, according to her. As the story develops, one day a woman sits down next to our narrator and starts to talk. She says that, she just found out that her and her husband could not get children. Our narrator seems careless, until the woman starts crying. And after that moment our narrator has given a lot of thoughts of giving the baby to the woman. She decides to have the baby and give it away to the woman. Since our narrator does not know the name of the woman, the only chance she has is to, by a coincidence, meet the women by the bench. “But the bench was empty”.