Indledning
The short story revolves around the main character and the narrator, Laura, and how she struggles with the possibility of an oncoming divorce with her husband, Vernon Pringle.
Optimer dit sprog - Læs vores guide og scor topkarakter
Uddrag
Laura is mentally a bit under the weather because of her distant husband whom she shared half her life with. To regain contact, she decides to apply for a job at the same place as her husband.
Laura is shown to be forgetful and her mental health could be slightly unstable, as she walks around bare feet in the office, and says some unlikely lies: “I’ve grown some onions in the garden, and I had an interview last week,” I say. These are both, technically, lies, but could be true.”
This is most likely an attempt to gain her husband’s attention. Since she, later, mentions: “We began our relationship – half my life ago – in a bar, and those were our best times, telling each other the truth of our lives in the warm light”.
Laura describes herself as a talker, a communicator and is not very good at taking care of her appearance but tries her best nonetheless. This is visible in when she mentions how she arrived in the clothes she slept in and how she tried (but failed) to dry wash her hair.
Therefore, Laura is incredibly envious of a colleague of hers: Janny, who is well put together, and is described to be very feminine. Laura is trying to mend her relationship with her husband, by getting a job at his workplace trying to tell him she was serious and sincere.
Laura describes herself to be defective enough that she apparently must be divorced and that though she is silent it doesn’t come to her naturally. The fact that Laura had forgotten her shoes and was wearing the clothes she slept in illustrates how much out of touch she was with the world and its norms.
Her world has been slowly narrowed since she got married to her husband also indicating that she probably was a bored housewife.
The fact that she can’t speak clearly but only whisper around Vernon shows that she is nervous and that she might put him on a pedestal – making it seem that she might suffer from low self-esteem, caused by Laura and her husband drifting apart.
Laura is perhaps the only one wanting or making an effort to get her spouse back. Maybe because her spouse is her only source of interest in her life. She still cares for him – which can be seen in the following sentence: We began our relationship – half my life ago – in a bar, and those were our best times, telling each other the truth of our lives in the warm light”.
Skriv et svar