Sorry for the Loss
Sorry for the Loss
Dealing with death and the loss of someone you love is possible one of the most difficult emotions to deal with, even though death is something that happens all the time, all over the world; death is actually the only certain thing in life. When someone we love die, we, as relatives, are put in a difficult situation in which we are expected to react a certain way. Unfortunately delivering the terrible news is sometimes almost as bad as getting them, it is never easy being the relative to the dead one, but it might be just as hard for the person bringing the news. This is not made any easier by the fact that some people do not have a close friend or relative telling the bad news and therefore they will have to be confronted by a total stranger and this can create tension and complications.
In Bridget Keehan’s short story “Sorry for the Loss” from 2008, a catholic minister has to deliver the news of the death of an inmate’s grandmother, and she becomes surprised when his reaction does not match her expectations.
The main character in the short story is a catholic minister named Evie. She has, at the time of the story, been working in a prison for five years. She finds the noise and brutality in prison very intimidating and daunting, and that is the one of the mains reasons she tries to find comfort in prayer. When the story takes place, Evie has to deliver her first death notice, alone, to an inmate named Victor.
The short story starts in medias res and then proceeds chronologically. This means that we in the beginning of the short story do not know whom our main character, which we are going to meet and where the story takes place. The narrator of this story is a third person narrator with a restricted point of view. A restricted point of view, which is the opposite of a omniscient point of view, means that the narrator does not have access to the thoughts of anybody but the main character. If this story had an omniscient narrator we
Dealing with death and the loss of someone you love is possible one of the most difficult emotions to deal with, even though death is something that happens all the time, all over the world; death is actually the only certain thing in life. When someone we love die, we, as relatives, are put in a difficult situation in which we are expected to react a certain way. Unfortunately delivering the terrible news is sometimes almost as bad as getting them, it is never easy being the relative to the dead one, but it might be just as hard for the person bringing the news. This is not made any easier by the fact that some people do not have a close friend or relative telling the bad news and therefore they will have to be confronted by a total stranger and this can create tension and complications.
In Bridget Keehan’s short story “Sorry for the Loss” from 2008, a catholic minister has to deliver the news of the death of an inmate’s grandmother, and she becomes surprised when his reaction does not match her expectations.
The main character in the short story is a catholic minister named Evie. She has, at the time of the story, been working in a prison for five years. She finds the noise and brutality in prison very intimidating and daunting, and that is the one of the mains reasons she tries to find comfort in prayer. When the story takes place, Evie has to deliver her first death notice, alone, to an inmate named Victor.
The short story starts in medias res and then proceeds chronologically. This means that we in the beginning of the short story do not know whom our main character, which we are going to meet and where the story takes place. The narrator of this story is a third person narrator with a restricted point of view. A restricted point of view, which is the opposite of a omniscient point of view, means that the narrator does not have access to the thoughts of anybody but the main character. If this story had an omniscient narrator we