A Gap of Sky

A Gap of Sky

Adolescence is a difficult stage in life because you are no longer a child and not yet an adult. Even though you have more possibilities now to do the things you want; there will still be responsibilities, since it is also the time where you have to take some of life’s most important decisions, for instance what you want to study and where you want to live. However, it also the time where you in the process of making all these decisions you discover more about yourself. It is, though, not always easy to figure out which path you should take in life. In the short story “A Gap of Sky” written by Anna Hope in 2008, the main character Ellie is walking around the streets of London, having a hard time figuring out what she wants in life and the meaning of it.

The short story starts in media res and is about a nineteen-year-old university student called Ellie, who is waking up a late afternoon after having been partying until early morning. She can only remember small bits about what had happened the night before because she was drunk and on drugs. She suddenly remembers that she has a paper about Virginia Wolf due for tomorrow and if she doesn’t turn it in she will get kicked off the course. Therefore, she decides to start writing but then realizes that printer has run out of ink, so she must go get some before the stores close. The rest of the story takes places in the streets of London where Ellie is on the hunt for ink, and on the way gets distracted by several things. At first she gets distracted by a glove and after that by an exhibit in a museum about living and dying, and lastly by some protection stones outside a shop. All these things take her mind off the assignment and on subjects such as freedom, life and death. Fortunately, she seems to have changed at the end of the story, when she decides to write the assignment because it is the right thing to do.

The narrator in the short story is a third person omniscient narrator whose point of view is limited to Ellie. Besides this, the narrator is using the ‘’stream of consciousness’’ technique throughout most of the short story and it can for instance be seen in this quote ‘’Monday. It is Monday. Essay there is an essay due, important, due for Tuesday morning. Virginia Woolf and what was the title? Something Oyster of Perceptiveness. Fuck.’’ (p.1, l.14). This is a perfect example of the stream of consciousness technique, since it portrays Ellie’s point of view through her thoughts. Furthermore, there are two other things we can draw from this quote, firstly we can see that this way of writing makes the reader slightly confused, however, it still manages to give the reader a profound insight into the mind of the confused Ellie. Secondly, we can get an idea of the text’s language out from this quote, since we can see the use of a swearword and a rhetorical question. The rest of the story