Divorced, Beheaded, Survived by Robin Black

             Through the memories of the narrator, Sarah, who as a child lost her brother Terry, and her son's loss of his best friend in the short story "Divorced, beheaded, survived" the author, Robin Black, deals with the theme of death in different aspects.
             The first-person narrative style is used to structure the story with flashbacks of Sarah's childhood and her present life. It makes the story intense and personal as she sounds reliable and authentic. The language is simple and objective even though the emotive issue of death normally is even more emotionally charged if a person has been close to it. Her emotional expression regarding her brother Terry's death is that she was shocked because of the sudden result of the very short-term period of illness (p. 3, l. 48-51), which in one way indicates some kind of indifference and acceptance of the inevitability of death or just the fact that thirty years have gone and made distance to the subject. It has left deep marks on her soul and she has actually become a bit superstitious and irrational. On purpose she chooses to wait longer between getting their first and second child so the difference of age is another than between hers and Terry. By doing that she hints to the possibility of that being the reason for Terry's death.
             The story is written in present time, but with a lot of flashbacks in past tense to Sarah's childhood. It begins with a flashback to Sarah's childhood when she, her brother and three of their friends, Johnny Sanderson, Jeff Mandelbaum and Molly Denham, are playing a role play about King Henry VIII of England and his six wives and their different fates. In this flashback we also hear about Terry's death and throughout the short story we hear about him and Mark and his loss by turns. The two deaths and the part where the families are dealing with it are written in a parallel to each other which calls attention to the theme...

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Divorced, Beheaded, Survived by Robin Black. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 05:13, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/204947.html