There's A Hole In Everything

1679 Words7 Pages
There’s a Hole in Everything is a short story about being a troubled teenage, a teenager who experiences an inner fight: a fight between the controllable and the uncontrollable. The short story illustrates themes such as loneliness, having an imaginary friend, lack of communication etc. It often appears that people on the inside are the complete opposite of what they show on their outside. There’s a Hole in Everything shows both the inside as well as the outside of a young girl. The first person narrator is a girl by the name Rosa. She is neither a kid, nor an adult (p. 2, l. 54), so she must be classified as an adolescent, a teenager. She has typical teenage-problems, such as lack of good and genuine communication with her parents, social problems in her school etc. She is lonely, alone in the crowd of people: “I sit still, everyone moving past me and round me like I’m a blockage in a drain.” (p. 1, l. 16-17). She has one friend, though. But that friend is the biggest reason for concern about Rosa. She is named Shelley, and for a big part of the short story, Rosa gives the reader the belief, that Shelley is real. But she is in fact partly an imaginary friend. Partly, because she did exist once. She was Rosa’s friend, but moved away, never to return. Rosa justifies the imaginary Shelley by saying: “She’s not my imaginary friend though, she’s a might-have-been-friend, a should-have-been-friend.” (p. 6, l. 182). Shelley can be classified as everything Rosa wants to be and how Rosa wants other people to see and perceive her. Shelley is what Rosa is incapable of achieving. Also, Shelley simply is Rosa’s way of surviving. A girl in the school named Natalie James, is bullying her: “She came up with the WE LOVE ROSA badges, and began the campaign about my so-called body odour. Stealing my things – a hair slide, a biro – that was Natalie’s idea, too”. (p. 4, l. 121-124).
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