Sin Bin Essay

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The Sin Bin or Lucy’s Heart Analytical essay Adolescence is, and always has been a hard-hitting and dilemma-filled stage on the journey of growing up. This stage and its dilemmas has been described in many movies and books, such as The Sin Bin or Lucy’s Heart, which was written by Lucy Cross in 2000. The short story brings out the common issue with the main character finding it hard to emancipate from the conflict he or she is experiencing. The story takes place in Cardiff the capital of Wales, and more specifically in a detention room. The atmosphere filling the room is very tense, almost overwrought. This gives us a good idea how Lucy is feeling, because of how the atmosphere is most commonly linked to the character’s emotions. These tense feelings have their base in the domestic triangle she has involuntarily become a part of. The domestic triangle causing the tension is build up around Lucy and involves Lucy’s mother and her best friend Bethan. They create the main conflict in the text, which can also be sensed in the title. They both belong in middle or the working class. Lucy is an extremely impressionable straight A-student, who finds it very hard to find her own self and be content with it. This initiates her smoking and make-up usage, despite her mother not letting her have cigarettes or use cosmetics. We also get to hear of Lucy hitting her former best friend Penny (because Bethan told her so). The text starts with “They put me in detention and now I’m drawing arterioles” When a story starts like this we say that it starts “in medias res”. This is a very typical way of starting a short story, it also moves our focus away from the characters (who we do not know yet), to the more descriptive atmosphere in the text. We also have a first person narrator in Lucy, which makes the story more relatable. Lucy’s relationship with is Bethan does not seem
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