Analyse af 'A Simple Exchange of Niceties'

An essay of “A of Simple Exchange of Niceties - Joanne Fedler”

1.X - English

The short story is about a pregnant girl, most likely a teenager, who accidentally have gotten pregnant with a man, who left her the moment he knew about it. At the beginning she is undoubtedly ready for taking an abort, as we at the very first lines read “The first available appointment was for next week. That was in nine days' time”. She has an obsessive relationship to a particular bench in the park that she really isn't fan of sharing. At the park, she meets another woman, and soon her view and decisions of the unexpected baby, changes.

I would say that our narrator may see herself kind as “the wrong piece of the puzzle”, among others because of her low self-esteem. At (P.1.L.19-20) she says; “You know when you're a little kid and everyone else runs ahead, and you feel like you're going to be left behind?". This tells us that she seems to be shy and afraid of getting left behind, as everybody else is getting away, which therefore leads me to think that she's independent of other people, like a little girl, which may cause the reason to why she was so naive to think that her ex-boyfriend would handle the baby with her. All these effects her self-esteem, and her believing that her mom doesn't like her, saying that she'd swap her for anything and didn't even bail her out for $500, doesn't make it much better. She doesn't seem to socialize well with others, therefore it doesn't look like she's got any other friends then “Barbie” we hear about.