She’s the bomb analysis

Indledning
Graduation. The end of an era and the ground for a new. All graduates know the mixed feelings of excitement and anxiousness you get when you know that the constant in your life will soon be over.

But sometimes the school can fill too much in your life, and you easily drift out of the rhythm. This is the case of the college student, Hailey “Hail” Phegler, a character in the short story She’s the Bomb, written in 2017 by T. Coraghessan Boyle.

Hailey is an anxious and negative girl who throughout her last year didn’t go to class and ended up not graduating.

Now Hailey has to deal with the consequences of not graduating, and you could say she has her very own way of doing that.

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Uddrag
The story of She’s the Bomb is about a young woman who is at the end of her college years, Hailey Phegler.

She calls in a bomb threat at her college graduation ceremony, to avoid the embarrassment of her mother figuring out that she is not getting her degree.

She is ultimately arrested by the police, bailed out, and then ends up working in a clothing store. The story takes place in contemporary America. This is evident in how we she various text-messages throughout the story.

The main setting is at a graduation ceremony in the fictional city of Hibernia, New York and starts in medias res. In the story we are introduced to various minor characters, but the main character is Hailey.

She is shown to us as an anxious person who also has some aggressive, judgmental and lazy traits.

This can be seen in her interaction at the graduation place with her fellow student, Stephanie Joiner.

As Stephanie walks up to Hailey to make some small-talk, Hailey’s first thoughts are: When she glances up from her phone in a tic of annoyance, the first person she locks eyes with is Stephanie Joiner, who was in her Introduction to Poetry class last spring and who has zero style and a brain the size of a Snickers bar… (ll. 14-16).

This shows us her judgmental trait, as she immediately thinks of the negative sides of Stephanie. Her thoughts might just be a product of her annoyed mood though, as stated in the first sentence.

Hailey is also described as a procrastinator by her mother (ll. 46-48). It also seems like she doesn’t have a very good relationship with her mother, who is described having nagged her all of her life and put some kind of pressure on her shoulders.

You can’t afford irony when your mother looks at you like she wants to cut you up into small pieces and feed you to the sharks (ll. 135-136).

This could be an explanation to Hailey’s anxiety as the lack of support in her life has actually made her into the procrastinator that she is accused of being.

Hailey also appears to not be very smart: they traced her calls and came up the aisle and took her away in handcuffs (ll. 137-138).

This shows us that she didn’t really think calling in a bomb threat through as the police could easily trace the calls back to her cellphone. It might also show us that she is impulsive and acts in the heat of the moment.