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A Journey: Analisys

Decent Essays

A Journey

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Life is all abort accepting how our lives have turned out. Sometimes life makes us wonder whether we have made the right decisions or not. All the decisions life throws at us is only to make us stronger as a person. After we have made a big decision all of us come do doubt whether we have chosen the right thing to do. This mental journey of self-assessment is what the protagonist, Mary, experiences in the short story "A Journey" by Colm Tóibín from 2006

Mary has had a hard life, she has seen how hard can be, she has a clinically depressed son, and a paralyzed husband and during the long drive back from the hospital whith her son in the back seat, she think about how her life has turned out to be. The story is told by a …show more content…

Mary is stopped in her life as she stops the car, and she is now trying to change things, starting with the relationship with his son. This goes hand in hand with the poem Lucinda Matlock by Edgar Lee Masters' from 1916. In the poem the speaker also talks about how she has lived her life, and how there has been good times and bad times. She has enjoyed her life, but she has still lost eight of her twelve children. Lucinda argues that you have to take charge of your life and take the good times with the bad. As she finishes her poem, “it takes life to love life”[2]

When she decides to stop the car, she finally makes a breakthrough in their communication. Mary is not only using this mental journey to think about her son, but also about her life with her husband, whom she thought she knew. Once again she thinks back on her life with Seamus and thinks about all the happy times they had together. Seamus is much like David, he does not give her any attention. The thoughts Mary deals with in regards to her son and husband are very well illustrated in Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage from 2008. “We think we know the ones we love […] But what we love turns out to be a poor translation a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know”[3] She feels that they ignore her and do not appreciate her, not only by her by husband, but also by her son. Mary is moving one step closer to taking

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