English Essay No Angel

A. No Angel

Everybody knows how hard it is to loose somebody you love, and many experience grief and it is not a fun thing. Everyone react differently with his’ or her’s sorrows. It can be a very painful experience to loose someone you love and someone cannot handle to be alone. Many want to get rid of the pain, and try to forget it all, and some want to hold on to the memories about their lost ones, because they are afraid to be alone. The loneliness even makes some people see things that don’t exit like ghost and dead people. Things like this are presented in this story, “No Angel” written by Bernie McGill.
The story ”No Angel” is written in narrative, first person. Everything that happens, we see through the main characters eyes. Her name is Annie.

About the composition in the story, it is jumping in the time. There are a lot of flashbacks and even flash forwards too. The first flashback, the main character meets her dad for the first time after his death. She is in the bathroom when he appears, and he is small talking with her. The daughter knows everything about her father, and we know that by the detailed and specified description of the dead father. That tells us that she was very close to him. After this we immediately jump over to another flashback, where he appears on a train on it’s way to Belfast. In this flashback we get to know the main characters family a little better. This scene indicates how important the jumping in time and the flashbacks is, because it gives us a picture of the messages, the themes and of some of the characters in the story.
In this short story we hear about Robbie, who is the main characters brother. He is very rude but confidant, and our main character admire him a bit because of her shyness. ”Some of the time I admired him for it; wished I could speak without looking to the left and right of me first.” (page 4, line 75-76.) “Robbie, on the other hand, was loud, drank too much, lost all his money on poker machines, stole fags out of Daddy’s coat pocket, took no interest in cattle rearing.” (page 4, line2-4.) He wasn’t the son his father had wished for. “My brother Robbie wasn’t the son my father had had in mind for himself.” (page 3, line 68.) Robbie died in a car accident, and left lying on the road. “.. they left him, lying on the road like a bag of rubbish..” (page 3, line 63-64.)
We also meet her boyfriend, Thomas. Later on they break up. Thomas is a very confident and strong willed person, “I think is was Thomas’s confident I fell for.” (page 6, line 157-158.)
Then we hear about the mother too, she probably dies from a heart attack, but we do not know for sure, “She dropped like a stone one day in the kitchen; never spoke again.” (page 4, line 99.), but it is only the main character and the dead father we get to meet in the story. Our main character seems like a very sad and lonely person, the only person she is in contact with is her dead father, and he is not even a real person. It is not directly written that she is lonely, but she has lost her brother and both of her parents, and she sees the ghost of her father, tells us that she misses them a lot, and she desperately needs someone to talk to.
The composition of the short story is connected with the super natural happenings – the fact that the ghost of the dead father appears in every single section. The main character, Annie, is not afraid of him, she likes to see him. One day she is out driving, and her father appears again. And she asks him; “Daddy, do you see...?” (page 6, line 166.), she does not get to ask him the whole question, before he disappears - but I think that she wants to know if he have seen her brother Robbie and her mom. Annie, the main character, has spent twenty-two years alone, with her fathers ghost, it seems like it doesn’t affect that much.
In the last part of the story, she is at a theatre, and then her father appears again, and this time he brought the mother and brother with him. Then she tells him; “Will you leave me alone now?” (page 6, line 179.), and that means that she is ready to let go. The word you, she maybe refer to all the pain and grief she has been through. She needs her family, and she will always do that, but she needs to move on, and by asking her father to leave her alone, she shows that she is ready, and she has become a more independent woman.
The title “No Angel” refers to one of the themes, the dilemma to get over your sorrows for your lost ones. The main character, Annie, does not want to admit that her loved ones are gone, but after many years she is ready to let it all go. But she will always have the memories about them.
It’s a difficult thing to loose someone you love, and some people get stuck in the memories, but one thing is certain; you can not live like this, all alone and sad – you have to move on, sooner or later.