Analyse af Mark Sloukas 'Crossing'

All over the west we find traditional nuclear families are being replaced with other solutions, but mostly broken homes. Promises are made and probably broken until the protagonist in Mark Sloukas novel Crossing, 2009, realizes that he must do something now and we as readers are forced to chose sides like a child in a divorce must do.

Our main character in this short story must be in his early thirties or late twenties since he has already been married, divorced and have had a son in the meantime who, however, is still a very young boy(l. 83 and 129). The indication of his divorce is made very subtle by the narrator, pointing out “the azaleas he’d planted” (l. 14) at the mother of his sons house, but even though he has once lived in the house, he walks inside with his head bowed down like a visitor (l. 16) and the lack of clear communication between his ex-wife and him plus the fact that his son is obviously not living with him half the time points toward a rather ugly divorce.

The protagonist is full of regrets and promises. It is hard to restore trust when it has already broken down, and perhaps that is exactly what happened between him and his son during the divorce. He hadn’t been happy in a while, and the narrator goes out of his way to underline the promises that our protagonist is so determined to keep. Being at the house by down, “as he’d promised” (l. 15), being insecure about security but deciding to go through with the trip “… nowhere else to go. And he’d promised” (l. 40), and of course he also gave a promise of when to be back. All in all the protagonist has decided prior to the time of telling that he was tired of not wanting anything and after realizing his own relationship with his father as a blessing and it not being given that the same relationship evolves between the son and him, the protagonist has sat down to think and come to the conclusion that the only way to get a friendship with his son was to take notes from the male bonding, he knew from his dad, which was a trip out in the wild. This is the first one they take and the most crucial one, but the father has already planned more to come in his mind.