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Life is all abort accepting how our lives have turned out. Sometimes life makes us wonder whether we have made the right decisions or not. All the decisions life throws at us is only to make us stronger as a person. After we have made a big decision all of us come do doubt whether we have chosen the right thing to do. This mental journey of self-assessment is what the protagonist, Mary, experiences in the short story "A Journey" by Colm Tóibín from 2006
Mary has had a hard life, she has seen how hard can be, she has a clinically depressed son, and a paralyzed husband and during the long drive back from the hospital whith her son in the back seat, she think about how her life has turned out to be. The story is told by a limited third person narrator, and seen from the mother, Mary’s point of view. By observing Mary’s thoughts, it becomes easy to see how much her choices in life has meant to her and how much she still think about them. Especially when it comes to the son’s diseases – it is something she is very concerned with. Her main concern is whether she and her husband had something to do with his condition.
“Were they to blame, she and Seamus, and in what way, for the fact that their twenty-year-old son whom she was driving home from the hospital had spent the last seven months there suffering from silence, as she called it; the doctors called it depression”[1]
Mary searches her memory to find answers to the many questions she had build op in her mind though the years. Through a number of flashbacks she is trying to find some clues as to what could be the cause of her and David's condition. It is questions like whether Mary and Seamus perhaps gas spent to little time at home while Mrs. Redmond babysat David, and whether hey should not have sold the old shop.
Mary and Davis’s relationship is tens; Mary is trying to break the ice between them by asking David for a cigarette. The relationship between them develops throughout the