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Erosive

Decent Essays

Erosive – Ali Smith

“The waking thought of her, sunlit and new, then the all-day hopeful lightheadedness, and behind it all, dull as a blown-out light bulb, the fact of the word never.” (ll. 5-7 p. 1). The quote is from the nameless main character in Ali Smith’s short story “Erosive” from 2003. As the quote implies Ali Smith tells the story of unrequited love. Through post modernistic techniques he portrays the main characters coping with hopeless love. A distinctive feature of post-modernistic literature is that they are often open to interpretation. The story can therefore be analyzed in multiple ways, and the observations I have made are not “set in stone”.

The main character in “Erosive” is a first-person narrator who falls in …show more content…

“What he means is; you don’t mow your lawn enough. Look at your garden, look at it for God’s sake.” (ll. 4-5, p. 151)
The quote is from a conversation with his neighbor. During the conversation the neighbor is mowing his lawn and the narrator interprets as if the neighbor is mocking him. The text is written from a first-person perspective, and it is therefore important to be critical towards the narrator. The narrator tells the story in his point of view, which means that the way he interprets events isn’t necessarily the truthful way they happen. The neighbor is most likely just mowing his lawn without having any judgmental thoughts towards the main character. Throughout the story the main character has multiple of these kinds of interpretations. When he is being assisted at the supermarket, he feels like the women, helping him, are finding him odd, although their conversation seems perfectly normal. This self-doubt is perhaps a consequence of the erosive process he going through, because of his hopeless love situation.

In addition to the complex main character, the composition of “Erosive” is especially post-modernistic. Post-modernism is about breaking with the established. Ali Smith breaks with the traditional perception of a story’s structure. The story is divided into four sections: an introduction of the narrator, a beginning, middle, and end. What it is particular about the structure is that after the introduction, the narrator jumps

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