Lightboxes By Emma Cleary Analysis

Lightbox

In our modern society it has been custom to live very open and see-trough lives, putting everything on the Internet and social media. A lot of people can easily be fascinated by the lives of these social-media-celebrities, which are admired often by the thousands. But admiring can easily turn to obsession. And looking can sometimes turn to surveillance and stalking. In the short story lightboxes, the author Emma Cleary writes about the consequences of living such an open life.

The short story is written in 1. Person narrator, and we follow an unnamed man. The point of view makes him a very unreliable narrator. At the beginning the reader easily feels sympathy for the narrator, because of the way his and Elsie’s relationship I described.
In the text as well as in the language. In the first passage, most of the sentences start with the word she. “She stares at a crossword […] She is sitting at the small table […] She looks up.” Whereas the second passage most sentences are started by the word I. “I never shopped here until Elsie. I thought it was for vegan freaks. […] I’m glad. I used to think…” By showing the obvious yet subtle distance between the to people, the reader gets a clearly idea that something is of from the very start of the novel. In that way, the atmosphere: ends up having a creepy and uneasy undertone. You can from the beginning feel something is wrong, even though it is only revealed later, the narrator has been talking Elsie and not being in a
“Across the street, people cast kinetic silhouettes inside their individual lightboxes, like puppets in a thin