She earns a lot of money and knows how to spend them. This gives her a lot of power. All together she lives a very exclusive life with theatres, art galleries and dinner parties. This life, however, doesn’t give her the power she needs so she kidnaps her younger brother and starts control him and his life. Her younger brother is 16-years-old when she kidnaps him. He was born late in the parent’s marriage and is much younger then Ann. When she comes to tell her parents that she will bring him to Kensington he has just left school and doesn’t know what to do with his life. It wasn’t hard to Ann to convince him to come with her to a big house near London and with all the money he could dream of. However, Ann immediately takes over the brother’s life by controlling his education, finances and life in general.
He had no interest in the media. He thought he despised it. But he knew his sister expected something of him and media studies seemed the lesser of all the evils that college offered.
He doesn’t like media studies but he go to college anyway to please Ann. In the end he gets an alcohol abuse probably because of his loss of identity and because of being subject to Ann’s domination and control.
Ann denies his alcohol abuse. She almost encourages him to drink.
Although he wanted to avoid this ritual his sister dragged him into it. As the world left one century and entered another he was crying. His sister’s hopes were high. He was getting better. Back to normal.
At the millennium evening he has been sober for almost a year. He wishes he could start over, run back to his mother and father or begin a new life with Marianne and his daughter. But when the people join hands for Auld Lang Syne Ann makes him drink. He is not strong enough to tell her to mind her own business and let him pass the ritual. He is crying because he knows he is under her control and he starts drinking again.
In some way the narrator is right it is Ann who kills her brother by strangle him with her possessive attitude.
This is also emphasized by the title Abduction. Abduction means to hold a person back against his will. Ann doesn’t hold her brother with robes but she holds him back from living his own life trough control and domination.
Domination, control and loss of identity are some of the main themes in the short story Abduction. Domination is also a theme in the text women in love in which a relationship between a man and a woman is described. The man says, she wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant.
This is the man’s description of a woman but it could just as well be the description of Ann.
At the picture A man’s head in a woman’s Hair is domination also shown. The woman is placed above the man and has “captured” the man in her hair which shows she has him where she wants him. The man is coloured white which shows innocence, dead but also loss of identity like the brother’s loss in Abduction.
2. Exercise - Fiction versus Non-Fiction
First of all fiction differs from non-fiction by being a text made up by its author. A Non-Fiction text describes the reality while a fiction text can be the author’s free imagination.
The fiction text doesn’t have to, like the non-fiction text, contain any true information. The reader can, therefore, read the fiction text more open and from a literary point of view. The relevance of this is that the reader can be freer when he reads fiction because he doesn’t have to be critically and ask questions about the author, the subject or the credibility.
The difference between fiction and non-fiction is very clear in the two texts Abduction and Adler’s Psychoanalytical Ideas on Development. Although Abduction seems very realistic the reader feels free to read it from a literary point of view probably because most people know the genre of short stories is fictional. Should Abduction be read as non-fiction the reader had to be critical and start ask questions such as, is there really a paediatrics doctor called Ann in London? And is it legal for a boy on 16 years to move away from his parents without any intervention from the law?
By reading it as fiction all these question are avoided.
The reader, however, has to be critical of the text Adler’s Psychoanalytical Ideas on Development what is Adler’s evidence for his statements?
So fiction differs to non-fiction by give the reader more freedom to read and enjoy instead of being critical and call the statements in question.
