Analytical Essay on "owl"

Analytic essay on Owl

By Jackie Kay

Struggling and dealing with one’s past is some of the themes in Jackie Kays short story Owl.            

Being on your own, growing up and leave what happened in the past behind, isn´t always that easy, which the story clearly has as an aspect.

The story is about the two women Barn and Tawny, who have been friends since they were children. They were at an age of 9 and 10 years old on a holiday together, because their families were friends. While during this trip something really surprising happened. They noticed that Barn´s mother and Tawny´s father was flirting, they were possibly having an affair with each other. They also saw this screaming owl, which they both got really fascinated and inspired by.                                                                                      Their childhood had a big influence on them, while becoming older and they both clearly remembers this summer and the owl as adults, when they and talked about their past and their separate adult life´s.

Owl is mainly about the two girls Barn whose real name is Anita and Tawny whose name is Marion. It is primarily based on the girl’s friendship, and how they both are dealing with their past as adults. Anita and Marion are the story´s two main characters.

The story is written with a first-person narrator and speaks by the voice, Anita. That means that the story only is told from Anita´s point of view. Therefore, the readers hear a lot about how Anita feels and think, but only hear the basic surface on Marion and her thoughts, of course from Anita´s perspective. “I´d already imagined quite a gory and glorious and gut-wrenching scene where our big barn owl gobbles a wild rabbit whole, and it´d hurt me to visualize it so vividly”, here is a good example on Anita telling about her feelings and her being the first-person narrator. Barn being the first-person also gives the reader a better contact with her and her feelings and it also has the technique, that the reader can identify themselves in her.

Barn is as told the main character in the story. As narrator Barn starts jumping back in time which also is called the retro perspective technique and then she looks back at her childhood. As a child, she was quite selfish and didn´t really sympathize in others, but that isn´t an unusual behaviour from any other child. She didn’t wanted Sandra their friend to come between her and tawny´s friendship. She even made Sandra cry, when she told her, what they were doing on their holiday, and reminded her about, that she wasn’t there and that she wasn’t a part of it. Besides being a bit possessive, she also was a little curious girl, because she really wanted to know what happened between her Father and tawny´s mother, and she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Barn wasn’t only possessive, because after talking bad to Sandra, she started feeling bad. “Sandra´s getting boring,” I said to tawny and tawny said “She´s all right,” Which made me feel miserable and worried”. She said that it made her feel miserable and worried, which must say that, that she probably felt sorry for being a bit evil to Sandra, but she was just a normal child, who acted a bit childish.