Essay
In countries all over the world, people, especially teenagers, have problems finding themselves, figuring out what they want to do with their life and finding their own freedom. There is different ways to obtain this, but no matter what path you choose, you need to somehow change and develop. In this story we hear about a 19-year old girl named Cassie, who is trying to do exactly this.
“Monday. It is Monday. Essay there is an essay due, important, due for Tuesday morning… Fuck.” This is a typical train of thought from Jessie, in this case right after she woke up in the beginning in the story, realizing her current situation.
The way the narrator zooms in on Jessie’s thoughts is a mechanism used throughout the story. It shifts between describing her actions from a distance in longer and more complex sentences, to zooming in on her thoughts in very short sentences, written in spoken language (example of transition: p. 2, l. 42-50).
The issue which keeps the story going is the fact that Jessie needs ink to write her very important essay, which will keep her from being thrown off her course, and therefore the leit motif. If you think in abstractions, you could say, that she is in the need of ink to write her future with.
But getting the concrete ink is a difficult task for Jessie for several reasons; the first is that she has been out all night, doing K, coke and drinking lager – from what she vaguely remembers, and therefore has to do an all-nighter. This clearly tells us something about the way she lives, and what kind of social connections she has.
Also, when she calls her friend, Toby, to get ink, he doesn’t answer. This probably isn’t unusual behavior from her friends, and by that I mean being there for her when she actually needs help for something sensible. But she is probably the same type of person as her friends, one who is living a hard, underground life in the weekends, despite her appearance as a normal