Analyse af novellen 'The Red Line'

The modern society is like a moving tube following a red line. It is always moving, and it is always going somewhere new. Even though you are trying, you cannot always keep up with the red line and move on like the others. Therefore you will find yourself in the middle of chaos, unable to do anything. However there are some people, who is afraid of the constantly changing world, and who just want everything be as it was before. The modern society has its advantages and its drawbacks. On one hand we have become more individualized and have become more contemporary, however on the other hand some of us cannot keep up with each other, and does not fit in with the rest of the society. In this particular short story “The Red Line” written by Charles Higson, we hear about a life changing story through three different people’s perspectives, and how the modern society has its effect on them.

The story is set time wise in the modern society. We do not know in what time it takes place exactly, however we can conclude that it is set time wise in the 20th or the 21st century, because of the way our characters describe their surroundings: “You couldn’t walk, always it had to be busses and what the English called the tubes” (p. 64, l. 29-30). Here we get an impression of a modern city, with contemporary travelling possibilities. It is a city that is always in a hurry and where walking almost is not an option, since they both have busses and subways to use. There are many other indications, which show us that this story is set in a modern world, for example it is described that there are escalators: “The escalator was endless.” (p. 72, l. 2). Since the escalator is a modern and recent invented thing, we can conclude that this story also takes place in our time.