Divorced, Beheaded, Survived

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Divorced, Beheaded, Survived is a short story written by Robin Black (2010). It is a story of death, grief and mourning, and how these things affect a mother and her son, in two different situations, thirty years apart. In this essay I will make an interpretation and an analysis of Robin Blacks short story. The story is about a woman by the name of Sarah - who is also the story’s protagonist - in her early forties, who, because of a friend of her son’s recent death, recalls on an event which had a tremendous impact on her own life, the death of her brother. The story revolves around two places in time, her childhood and the present. With two different timelines and two different stories that has a big resemblance that only becomes clearer, closer to the end, when the two stories intertwines, and the plot becomes more obvious. The first story is about the protagonist’s childhood, where the neighborhood kids, joyfully participates in a play on King Henry VIII of England and the execution of the Queen; Anne Boleyn, who was the second wife of the King. The play is usually performed with the protagonist, a girl named Molly Bentham and Terrance, the younger brother of the protagonist, who is also the one that plays Anne Boleyn. In the spring of 1974, Terry gets severely ill and dies, afterwards the children stop playing. It ends with her beginning high school - That is fittingly for the story called Henry VIII - and her teacher rephrasing the rhyme to remember the wives of Henry VIII, “Divorced beheaded died, divorced, beheaded, survived” and her writing it down as if she might otherwise had forgotten. The latter, which plays out in present time, is about the protagonist’s son, Mark whose best friend Peter was run down three weeks earlier in an accident on the Long Island Expressway. The story’s structure is very interesting, especially the fact that it is
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