Notes on a scandle

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NOTES ON A SCANDAL by Zoë Heller

The title of the book offers to us an understanding what as to may be to going happen in the story. The story is written with a first person narrator and so we know that the story will be just one person's way of thinking. Also as a reader we must ask, is the whole story unreliable when written in this diary form because it is one person's view point?

Through the involvement of Barbara in this story we do get a participant and narrator in one person, so we are invited to believe everything that this person is going to tell us about everybody relating to her. But Barbara also uses the power of control, because she does not tell as what we would like to know about her relationship with Jennifer. Her comments hint that Barbara has been obsessed in the past. From Barbara's viewpoint we can understand that she is been too intense in the relationship with Jennifer. Barbara wept in a train station after seeing Jennifer with her new friend. This suggests that Barbara's feelings go beyond friendship.

Barbara tells as that, "From time to time one of my colleagues will call me 'Barb' or, even less desirably, 'Babs' but I discourage it." But who would call her 'Babs'? Everyone is scared to talk to her; she seems an unpopular person.

Heller also hints to us about the similarity in age between Polly (seventeen years old and still a girl without boyfriend) and Connolly (fifteen years old, Sheba's lover). Sheba is a forty-two-year old pottery teacher at St George's school. After
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Sheba fell in love with Connolly she feels much younger and her feelings seem adolescent to the reader. Sheba's husband is nearly the same age as Barbara around sixty years old, and both of them feel younger by having a relationship with Sheba. Barbara thinks, after the loss of Jennifer, that she has got a kindred spirit in Sheba. Barbara and her diary are inseparable; even when visiting her sister she spends more time with her diary than with the family; suggesting the diary itself has become an obsession.

There are also advantages of the first ...

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