A Journey is a story written by Colm Tibn in 2006. The story is about Mary, her family and their problems.
A Journey A Journey is a story written by Colm Tóibín in 2006. The story is about Mary, her family and their problems. In this essay I will find out what could cause the problems. To support my claims I will make an analysis and interpret the short story “A journey” in which I will put my interpretation into perspective with this to other items. The story starts in media res where we get introduced to Mary the protagonist, and her son David. At the beginning of the story there is a flashback. The flashback is from David’s childhood. Suddenly the story moves on to present time, where Mary picks her son up from the hospital and drives him home. Almost the whole story takes place in the car. Mary is an ordinary married woman and it seems like she has an unhappy and depressed family. She lives with her husband Seamus and her son David, in the house her father gave her at her weeding. David is suffering from a depression and Mary does not know why, neither can she figure it out. Mary seems to be a good and careful
mother “She dreamed for a second that they had not sold it and thought that working there every day might help David” Even though if it seems like Mary has been a good mother, she still has not spend a enough of her time with David when he was child. “Mrs. Redmond, who lives in a nearby cottage and whose husband died just after David was born, came in every day to help and babysat at night if they wanted to get out” This might indicate that it was not Mary who raised David, but Mrs. Redmond. Mary also seems ...
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mother “She dreamed for a second that they had not sold it and thought that working there every day might help David” Even though if it seems like Mary has been a good mother, she still has not spend a enough of her time with David when he was child. “Mrs. Redmond, who lives in a nearby cottage and whose husband died just after David was born, came in every day to help and babysat at night if they wanted to get out” This might indicate that it was not Mary who raised David, but Mrs. Redmond. Mary also seems like a quite, selfish woman as she thinks about herself more than she thinks about her son ”She smiled at the idea that now she would have two of them for company. Nonetheless, she wanted David to stay at home, no matter how grim his silences, no matter how many days he spent in his bed with the curtains drawn” This shows that Mary does not think about her son’s health. She only thinks about herself, she does not want David to move away from home. David is twenty years old and he suffers from depression. The reason why he is suffering is unknown, but it might be because of his childhood “Often, when Mary went down to the cottage to collect him, he did not want to come home. But then, once he was back in his own house, he would start to smile again” here we see that David wants to be at Mrs. Redmond house. He use to spend a lot of his time with her, so maybe he wanted Mrs. Redmond to be his mother, because she knew him better than Mary. The fact that he smiled when he came home, indicates that he was happy at home. Though it could be one of the reasons for why he becomes depressed, when he gets older. David’s Father Seamus was once a principal of a national school. Seamus is ill and paralyzed in the half of his body. He does not seem interesting in anything as well as David. “Even when she read the newspaper to him, Seamus did not seem interested”, even though he seems indifferent to almost everything, he still worries about his son. The title “A Journey” might reference to the end when Mary sees that her family is unhappy. The journey is here that she goes from an unreal world to a real world. It might also reference to a journey from Mary’s mind, back when David was a child and everything seemed perfect, compared to the present time where everything is bad. I have put my interpretation into perspective with the picture of Paul Mathey “interior with woman and child”. It is an oil painting from 1890. In the picture we can see a lonely boy in the front and his mother, who is busy with working in the background. You can put this panting into perspective with the story “A Journey”. The little boy in the front on the painting can be David, while the busy mother can be Mary. On the painting the mother does not spend time with her child and it can establish a depression on the child. I can also put the story in to perspective with text 4”Depression”. The text is about depression and it tells us what it is and what may have caused it. The text says “Depression in adolescence comes at a time of great personal change–when boys and girls are forming an identity distinct from their parents, grappling with gender issues and emerging sexuality, and making decisions for the first time in their lives”. In the text “A Journey” David is twenty years old, he is a grown up man and he needs to make his own decisions. He cannot ask his mother as he could when he was a little boy. The fact that he is growing up and becoming an adult, means he needs to be independent and this may also be a reason for why he suffers from depression. To make a short summary of the text I can now conclude that the author wants to tell us how hard it can be when child grows up a need to independent. The Journey from being a child to be an adult can be very hard. The fact that child needed to renounce his mother and the childhood to become independent, could result a depression. In the story “A Journey” is their flashbacks from Mary’s point of view and it help us to understand the situation. The first flashback is from David childhood “Mammy, how do people die?” he had asked, and Mary had explained how the soul left the body and then god (...)” here we have a dialogue between David and Mary where they both are having a conversation contrast to the car where it is just Mary who speaks while David is silent. The fact the author uses the kind of flashbacks might indicate that Mary miss the days where they had dialogue instead of monologue. Side af