The Hurt Man
The Hurt Man
In a town with a graveyard far more populous than the town itself lives Mat in the suburb to civilization. Even though his mother’s black mourning dresses reminds Mat that there were other children before him, they were never anything but small monuments; at least until The Hurt Man one day runs up to the house in seek of help. The consequence from this leads to the greatest realization in Mat’s life: That death will come to us all. The Hurt Man takes place in the fictional town of Port William in the late summer of 1888. We are lead through the story by a third person narrator that is supposed to be our protagonist’s grandson Andy, who has written down his grandfather’s story using Mat’s person as the point of view. Mat however is only a five year old when he experiences what his grandson will eventually write down, which makes an interesting angle although maybe quite unreliable as he was so young and told the story on so many years after. As a result of this everything is quite black and white; The Hurt Man is very hurt, the mother is very calm and his great realization of death comes very quickly after seeing his mother, Nancy, with The Hurt Man, there was no need for the little child to think about it for a while until the grand scale of things revealed itself to him. His experience from the day when The Hurt Man came had such strong influence on him, that the text even mentions that his memory of that day would always be partly incomplete. This supports my assumption that both the narrator and Mat are slightly unreliable. What we read in the text is probably not what really happened but more of a processed product of how ?what? Mat eventually remembers from that day and thus embossed by the influence it had on him. Port William is a very local town. You are not born to do great things there, and the route between being a child in school follows a straight road to the cemetery at the other end. This is a town most of its inhabitants
In a town with a graveyard far more populous than the town itself lives Mat in the suburb to civilization. Even though his mother’s black mourning dresses reminds Mat that there were other children before him, they were never anything but small monuments; at least until The Hurt Man one day runs up to the house in seek of help. The consequence from this leads to the greatest realization in Mat’s life: That death will come to us all. The Hurt Man takes place in the fictional town of Port William in the late summer of 1888. We are lead through the story by a third person narrator that is supposed to be our protagonist’s grandson Andy, who has written down his grandfather’s story using Mat’s person as the point of view. Mat however is only a five year old when he experiences what his grandson will eventually write down, which makes an interesting angle although maybe quite unreliable as he was so young and told the story on so many years after. As a result of this everything is quite black and white; The Hurt Man is very hurt, the mother is very calm and his great realization of death comes very quickly after seeing his mother, Nancy, with The Hurt Man, there was no need for the little child to think about it for a while until the grand scale of things revealed itself to him. His experience from the day when The Hurt Man came had such strong influence on him, that the text even mentions that his memory of that day would always be partly incomplete. This supports my assumption that both the narrator and Mat are slightly unreliable. What we read in the text is probably not what really happened but more of a processed product of how ?what? Mat eventually remembers from that day and thus embossed by the influence it had on him. Port William is a very local town. You are not born to do great things there, and the route between being a child in school follows a straight road to the cemetery at the other end. This is a town most of its inhabitants