Divorced, Beheaded, Survived

699 Words3 Pages
I will make an analysis of Robin Black’s short story “Divorced, beheaded, survived” written in 2010. The big theme is death, and it shows how it affects the relatives. The story starts in medias res, and is about a mother named Sarah, who has lost her two year older brother because he was very ill. Sarah is the story’s protagonist. The story is going on in the present, but as she tells about what happened 30 years ago, part of the text is past tense. Terry, which is the name of Sarah’s brother, was about 12-13 years old, when he died. In the text it says “... but then he died ’74, which shocked me when it happened…” , and at the end of the first page, the text relates to Johnny’s age, who was another pupil, and Terry was one year older than Johnny. They were together with some other kids making a play about Henry VIII and the execution of his second wife, Anne Boleyn. After Terry died in the text, she talks in the present. She has two sons, Mark and Coco, who are respectively 16 and 12 years old. She says “And maybe it was superstition that made me wait that extra stretch of time before getting pregnant again” , where she refers back to her brother and her, who were born 2 years apart. Three weeks earlier, Mark lost his best friend Peter in a car accident. At the end of the story, she is talking about Henry VIII when she got him in high school, when her teacher wrote “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived” on the board. It is hard to explain the story’s structure. It is kind of chronological, but with flash backs, which makes it a bit difficult to read and understand, as she jumps between the present and past. From the start of the text to line 47, she is in the past and talks about when she was young and before her brother dies. From line 48 to line 51 she tells about the death of Terry. After that she starts telling about the present and we
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