A Gap of Sky - Essay

1384 Words6 Pages
A Gap of Sky By Anna Hope Being a teenager is not always as easy as it may seem. This is the final stage of growing up and becoming an adult. In doing so you can evolve in many different directions, and in this process people will start to demand things from you, and there are certain expectations to live up to. At this stage it is expected, that your identity is, somewhat, in its final stage. This pressure and these expectations can be hard to cope with, and for some people, too hard. In Anna Hope’s short story “A Gap of Sky” we meet a young girl named Ellie, whom is in the middle of constructing her identity and is trying to find her place in life, but seems to have given up on this, being caught in a dilemma between expectations and desires. It seems as though she couldn’t cope with the aforementioned pressure, and couldn’t live up to her parents expectations, which has led to a poor relationship to her parents. Because of her bad experiences with expectations, she has surrounding herself with people, who don’t expect everything from her, and from these people, she can also gain the caring, that she must feel her parents have neglected. Unfortunately, chances are, that people, who don’t expect anything from you, don’t care for you either, and it seems that these are the kind of people Ellie has ended up with. The short story begins in medias res with the sentence “It is dark, but the wrong dark. Something is wrong with the dark.” With this sentence, a very gloomy atmosphere is created right from the beginning, the following description of the room and Ellie’s situation, drinking water from a pint glass, waking up with swollen cheeks, peeing in the sink etc. gives us the impression, that Ellie is a girl, who is living on the edge and is out of her depth. It is plain to see, that her lifestyle is very unhealthy, her chest is hurting and she has inflammation of
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