Novelleanalyse: 'A Fortune'

This short story is made by the author Joy Monica T. Sakagouchi, and it’s called “A Fortune”. The story is a novel, because we have this “in medias res” which starts in all novels. The story is a kind of flashback, where a guy thinks on his past, where he has been a pick pocket all his life. Then he meets a boy and his father, where the boy is just like himself. The guy had a sad past, because he doesn’t know where his father is, and he was a drinker. His mother lives in a trailer, but she is still this normal mother, who always trying to make her son an honest boy, and make him well since he was a small kid. She cries a lot, because she was worried for his son, should end as his father. The guy and the boy in the story share maybe the same destiny, which means they both have to fathers which are a kind of aggressive, and they both are boys.

The Narrator in this story is the guy himself, which means it’s a first person narrator, because we hear about feelings, but we don’t know his name. In the start there is a flashback where the narrator tells us, that the guy started as pickpocket, when he was only five years old, and when he was 7 he could do it all the time, without people discovered it. I guess it was his missing father, who taught him, how to be a pickpocket when he was 5 years old. A pickpocket means he steals from other people, and the way he do it, is to put his hands into other peoples coats or jackets, to take their wallet. When the narrator use this kind of flashback, we hear about the narrators society, how it was to be a pick pocket, how it was to have no money and how it was to steal from other people without guilt. If we look at the language, it’s almost slang through the whole story. “Slang” means he doesn’t use the normal words like mother and father, but instead words as “Ma” and “Pop”. There are also some sentences where we have “slang” “Hey kid, you lost?, (P. 8. L. 78) or the sentence “Hey, you Hungry?” (P. 9. L. 90.). This kind of language makes the story more comfortable to read, and more exciting, but the reason for that, could be that there are some action in it, when the father pinched his sons arm. When the guy meets the kid and his father at the fish market, he looks a lot at the small kid. “He was about seven years old, and he wore a blue cap that covered most of his neatly trimmed blond hair” (P. 8. L. 44) and then he decided to follow them nearly. When he looks at the kid, it’s almost like he saw himself in a mirror, as he also says in text “From the moment I saw him I felt that there was something familiar about him”. (P. 8. L.9). After that the guy steals the sons fathers wallet, without he discovered it, because at this time he pinched his sons arm, and that might also be the reason why the guy only takes the money from the boy father, and then he don’t want to give his wallet back, but instead throw it somewhere in the street. In this situation, I think that the guy, which also is the narrator really feel sorry for this kid, and it gave definitely some thoughts inside his head, because it could definitely be himself and his father, who stood in the same situation, and that’s maybe why he takes care of the boy and takes him at home, after he saw him standing all alone in the street, without someone to talk with. If we look at the style and the point of view, from the narrator’s side, then he thinks that the boy is very cute, because he is just like himself. In this story they both have a kind of bond, which they use to their own favor, an example of that is where they playing with some baseball cards “I have some baseball cards” (P. 9. L. 100.) In a way I think he missing his father, because he had a hard childhood, without a father to love, where he only have his mother at his side. He always look at the connection between the boy and his father, where they stood at the fish market, so he´s definitely missing him, and he hopes that he returns one day. Because acutely his father means a lot to him, since his father taught him how to be a pickpocket. I think the Title is a very good title, but I think it means the guys fortune, the fortune he gives away to the boy, because he thinks he deserve it. He says a lot of things to the boy, about that he deserve it, that he´s not stupid and that he´s very special, and says that he´s tremendous a lot of time. The theme in this story might be “Fortune”, because it’s not important to have money, because it’s more important to have people to take care of.