Essay - Vernissage

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Essay – Vernissage In the short story “Vernissage”, written by Claire Anderson-Wheeler, we meet a young boy named Alex. Alex is facing the dilemma whether he wants to stay in childhood or move on and enter adulthood. Alex’s parents, John and Frances, are having trouble figuring out their marriage. These troubles affect their son, and make him decide, that he wants to grow up and become an adult. The coming of age is the dominating theme through the story. Alex is a young boy, which exact age we do not know, but trough the story he seems like a boy who is being at the crossroads between childhood and adulthood. In the opening of the story, we can trough comparison with his mother se that Alex is clearly on a different level. On page 1 Alex is being a child by thinking of the fact that he did not get the subject beetles, which he wanted but instead he got earthworms, as a problem. Frances does not manage to understand his problem, which illustrate the differences between them and their experiences in life. Alex is using his imagination very much, which makes him childish as well. Alex likes to think of the dad’s vernissage as a person, he stretches out the word and transforms it to a persons name: Vernie Sadge. In this quotation Alex describes what “Vernie Sadge” would look like and how he would be: It is obvious that Alex does not like “Vernie Sagde”. Alex knows that the vernissage is to blame for the troubles between his parents. Later on (page 2), Alex is eating banana sandwiches, which symbolises his childhood. He is trying to make up his mind, whether he should continue eating banana sandwiches and with that stay in the familiar childhood or if he should stop eating banana sandwiches and with that enter an unknown and unexplored world of adolescence and adulthood. After witnessing a conversation between his parents, without them being aware of his
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