Analysis of Anna Hope's 'A Gab of Sky'

Youth is often characterized by independence, invincibility and freedom. Youth is the time when a person is young, but also the time between childhood and adulthood. In youth a person really shows his or hers true personality. The youth is therefore a major piece of the life puzzle, but being young is not always as easy as it sounds. Behind independence, invincibility and freedom is within reach expectations and responsibility. If worst comes to worst, this pressure will for some people end bad. This is also the case in the short story “A Gab of Sky”.

The short story “A Gab of Sky” is written by Anna Hope. The story talks about the themes drugs, freedom and life. It is an implicit 3. person narrator, who is committed to the main character because we have insight in her feelings and thoughts, seen from her point of view. The fact that it is Ellie’s point of view makes the language influenced by vocabulary of a nineteen-year-old. As an example: “Fuck. How the fuck did she manages to sleep so long?” (page 3, line 15). It almost feels like you are in her head reading the story.

The main character is a young girl, who is caught in a dilemma between expectations and desires. Ellie is the name of the nineteen-year-old girl, who struggles with a drug addiction. Ellie lives in the heart of London, and here she studies at a university. It appears that she lives at a college, because we are told that she has to walk all the way down the corridor to come to the toilet: “She thinks of the hall toilet, at the other end of a chilly, uncarpeted corridor,” (page 3, line 5-6). Even through she studies at a university, she is not taking her education very seriously, because she is about to flunk it if she does not hand in an essay about Virginia Woolf. Ellie is doing drugs, smoking a crack pipe, and skips lectures because she stays up late and parties. It is obviously not her own choice to study at the university, but her parents. “It was their fault she was doing this bloody course in the first place,” (page 4, line 66).