Analyse af Robin Blacks novelle '... Divorced, Beheaded, Survived'

When you are young, we often believe that we are immortal. We as young people do not understand the emotions followed by the idea of death. This is a short story on how to deal the death of a beloved friend or family. The story is told from a motherly perspective about how she once lost her brother, when young, due to illness. In the text we are informed about how, this death has caused her surrounding of her life to change completely.

The story I will be analyzing is called “… Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” the story as mentioned earlier is seen from the perspective of a mother, whom at a young age has experience death of a close person. This understanding of death the mother has, she uses to teach her son about the seriousness of death. The protagonist and narrator of the short story is the mother but she uses the form of past tense to and third person as herself, Her name in the story is Sarah “Great, Sarah. Really, really great”(Line 47). The story line of the text jumps about a lot, which is seen in the very beginning, when we are shown how close a friendship they had. Then Terry dies and we are fast forwarded 30 years into the “mothers” life were she is married and with children. After this jump in time we are rewinded back in time again to her childhood and are set in the situation where Terry dies, so the son can his mother coped with the death of her own brother. Although we are thrown to and fro thirty years in the text it is still easy for us (the reader) to understand the place and time in the story. As we can hear from the above, the structuring of the text is very odd. Finding the ages of the characters in the text, we have to read between the lines, as in this line, from the passage “Johnny was a year younger than Terry, a year older than me, and he was one of those kids” line 29. To figure these ages out we are forced to jump back in the text to find previous information on what the ages are of the characters.