Sea defences | Essay

Indledning
It is quite exceptional how we humans can feel so many emotions and how some of them such as guilt, can consume our conscience long after the incident that originally triggered the emotion took place .

This phenomenon is dealt with in Hillary Taylors short story Sea Defences from 2018, where a non-traditional structure, characters and an interesting narrative technique are used to great effect.

How we as humans react to traumatic events vary a lot from each individual. In this short story topics such as guilt and the way to cope with it is portrayed.

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Uddrag
Furthermore, lines 1-12 are interesting to look at as they create the dark mood which we can see throughout most of the story.

The language in lines 1-12 is primarily informal because of Michael’s adolescent behavior and special way of seeing the world.

For example Michael still calls his mom “Mumma”. He also calls the sea defences “seedy fences”. Thus, these lines definitely indicate that Michael has some sort of mental disorder and has the mind of a child.

This section also contains a lot of negative and dark words such as “mud”, “blood” and “wound” which foreshadows that something disastrous will happen.

Additionally, there are also various fragmented sentences such as “The storm that did it is called Angus so it’s like a person did it. On purpose.” and “i’m in the police station. Again.”