Ice Break Essay

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Sometimes horrible things happen. So horrible that you do not even want to think about it, because the thought of it happening to yourself and your family is just too painful. In the short story, "Ice break", a young girl experiences a horrible and traumatizing episode. Ice break is a story written by a Canadian writer called Astrid Blodgett. The short story is from the anthology The Journey Prize Stories 24 from 2012. The story is being told by Dawn, the first person narrator. Dawn is going on an ice-fishing trip with her Dad and by paying her sister Janie 5 dollars, she convinces her to come along too. The mother does not think they should go, because it is late in the ice-fishing season. Her father is sure that he knows what he is doing, and he does not seem to care about her opinion, so they go on the trip anyway. But on this trip, the ice collapses beneath them, while they are still in the truck and they begin to sink into the icing cold water. The father tries hard to help both of his daughters out of the truck. Only Dawn makes it out in time. The story is structured in a very untraditional way. Astrid catches the reader from the very first sentence, by starting the story in medias res. Then Astrid Blodgett continuously switches between a flashback to the accident on the lake, to another flashback, that takes place in the house right before they go on the fishing trip. In the end we hear from Dawns point of view what it was like after the accident. So we can divide the story into three parts. The first is the flashbacks to the actual accident. The second one takes place in the house right before the trip, where we get all the information about the family members. The third one is at the end, where Dawn looks back at the time after the accident. This constantly switching between flashbacks can make the readers confused, but it can also hook the reader,

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