Mount Pleasant
”Mount Pleasant”
By Mary-Louise Buxton
In this short story called “Mount Pleasant”, you see the world through a child’s eyes because the short story is written with a unique narrative technique and language. The reader’s mind is brought back to the time where ghosts and other wicked and impressive creatures filled the darkest corners of the thoughts from one’s young days. This curiously written short story is the product of Mary-Louise Buxton, written in 2005, and it is about Elizabeth and her imaginative everyday life.
“Mount-Pleasant” is about a young girl, whose name is Elizabeth, and she narrates the reader through her daily life. The story is written with an explicit first-person narrator, and it seems like reading a diary. This way of narrating makes the story quite interesting, because the young girl in the short story makes the story odd, childish and rather amusing, and she does not do anything to alter from spoken language. Mary-Louise, the writer, creates her own names for objects and concepts and she plays with the childish language, as the following quotation illustrates: “Mammy gives the ceiling The Look” (Page2, line 46). Certain nicknames have been given to several nouns and verbs such as: “Granny ‘Omi’s Duckering Ball” - which is an ornamental glass of ball (Page 2, line 49) and “Babby” - which simply means a ‘baby’ just spelled with an extra ‘b’. Adding nicknames and playing with words is just what kids tend to do, and the writer creates a childish feeling throughout the short story. In typical short stories, the climax is a spectacular, marvellous and sometimes unexpected event, but in contrast to a typical short story, the climax in “Mount Pleasant” is just a normal child’s night-experiences. No one would find that especially disastrous besides the child itself.
The narrator breaks free from the childish setting when she suddenly starts talking about how they used to get complemented by people in the area because her and sister was
By Mary-Louise Buxton
In this short story called “Mount Pleasant”, you see the world through a child’s eyes because the short story is written with a unique narrative technique and language. The reader’s mind is brought back to the time where ghosts and other wicked and impressive creatures filled the darkest corners of the thoughts from one’s young days. This curiously written short story is the product of Mary-Louise Buxton, written in 2005, and it is about Elizabeth and her imaginative everyday life.
“Mount-Pleasant” is about a young girl, whose name is Elizabeth, and she narrates the reader through her daily life. The story is written with an explicit first-person narrator, and it seems like reading a diary. This way of narrating makes the story quite interesting, because the young girl in the short story makes the story odd, childish and rather amusing, and she does not do anything to alter from spoken language. Mary-Louise, the writer, creates her own names for objects and concepts and she plays with the childish language, as the following quotation illustrates: “Mammy gives the ceiling The Look” (Page2, line 46). Certain nicknames have been given to several nouns and verbs such as: “Granny ‘Omi’s Duckering Ball” - which is an ornamental glass of ball (Page 2, line 49) and “Babby” - which simply means a ‘baby’ just spelled with an extra ‘b’. Adding nicknames and playing with words is just what kids tend to do, and the writer creates a childish feeling throughout the short story. In typical short stories, the climax is a spectacular, marvellous and sometimes unexpected event, but in contrast to a typical short story, the climax in “Mount Pleasant” is just a normal child’s night-experiences. No one would find that especially disastrous besides the child itself.
The narrator breaks free from the childish setting when she suddenly starts talking about how they used to get complemented by people in the area because her and sister was