A Journey
A Journey
A. Essay
Life is challenging. It doesn’t always turn out the way we thought it would – sometimes it turns out for the better sometimes for the worse. Due to these challenges life put upon us we once in while have to stop and ask ourselves whether or not the decisions we’ve made in life were right or wrong and wonder how life would have been if we had acted differently. At some point in life we all have to make such sentimental self-realization. In the short story “A Journey” by Colm Tóblín from 2006 the main character Mary finds herself in such situation. She is in a position where she feels forced to consider the way her life has developed and how she wants to continue it.
Mary deals with great challenges in her life, with a depressed son and a paralyzed husband, she feels alone, unappreciated and confused – she wonders where it went wrong? The short story covers the period and journey from when Mary picks up her son from the hospital to when they arrive at home. Along the drive home, with David, her son, crucially silent on the back seat, she tries to reconstruct her life and remind herself about the actions that might have caused the way things have turned out. Through a 3.person narrator whose point of view is stapled to Mary and we therefore get an insight in Mary’s many concerns in life. We become aware of her thoughts and memories and it becomes clear that Mary finds herself at a turning point of realization. In flashbacks Mary tries to put her life in perspective and find answers to what she could have done differently. She tries to expose the reason for her and her family’s condition, where particularly her son is a concern.
Even though she knows that David’s depression is an actual illness, she can’t help blaming herself and her husband Seamus. She slips back in her memory and tries “…to pinpoint the day it had started, the day she first noticed that David had grown beyond their reach and become sullen and withdrawn”[1] and she ask
A. Essay
Life is challenging. It doesn’t always turn out the way we thought it would – sometimes it turns out for the better sometimes for the worse. Due to these challenges life put upon us we once in while have to stop and ask ourselves whether or not the decisions we’ve made in life were right or wrong and wonder how life would have been if we had acted differently. At some point in life we all have to make such sentimental self-realization. In the short story “A Journey” by Colm Tóblín from 2006 the main character Mary finds herself in such situation. She is in a position where she feels forced to consider the way her life has developed and how she wants to continue it.
Mary deals with great challenges in her life, with a depressed son and a paralyzed husband, she feels alone, unappreciated and confused – she wonders where it went wrong? The short story covers the period and journey from when Mary picks up her son from the hospital to when they arrive at home. Along the drive home, with David, her son, crucially silent on the back seat, she tries to reconstruct her life and remind herself about the actions that might have caused the way things have turned out. Through a 3.person narrator whose point of view is stapled to Mary and we therefore get an insight in Mary’s many concerns in life. We become aware of her thoughts and memories and it becomes clear that Mary finds herself at a turning point of realization. In flashbacks Mary tries to put her life in perspective and find answers to what she could have done differently. She tries to expose the reason for her and her family’s condition, where particularly her son is a concern.
Even though she knows that David’s depression is an actual illness, she can’t help blaming herself and her husband Seamus. She slips back in her memory and tries “…to pinpoint the day it had started, the day she first noticed that David had grown beyond their reach and become sullen and withdrawn”[1] and she ask