A Journey

“A Journey” is a short story written by Colm Tóibín in 2006. The story follows Mary who picks up her twenty-year-old son David from a hospital. The car ride home is not only a journey in itself but becomes a ride of memories. A ride that through flashbacks shows Mary her journey of life which gets her to start reflecting on the decisions and choices she has made in the past. It is about acceptance. Accepting your life as it is or turned out without looking back and that is the key to start looking forward instead.

This story begins in medias res with a flashback. “’Mammy, how do people die?’” (Tóibín, line 1). The flashback is very important since it gives the readers an insight to what has happened in the past and how David’s childhood was like. It also gives the readers the ability to figure out the course of David’s depression which is interesting because his own mother cannot seem to find a reason. She does not want to accept that she might be the reason for his condition and through several flashbacks throughout her journey, she is trying to find another answer. “She tried not to think, tried to keep her mind fixed on the road ahead, but random images of places in the past kept coming to her, and there was nothing she could do to stop them.” (Tóibín, lines 51-53). She puts her focus on old problems she has had in the past, like selling her father’s shop, as if that is going to solve the current problem who is sitting in the backseat of her car. The protagonist gets the flashbacks on her journey home from the hospital but the flashbacks themselves take her on a journey through her own life. So with all the flashbacks combined, it becomes a point of no return for her since they open her eyes towards a whole new perspective of life. In that way the title can have two different meanings.

It takes place during March and it is dark and cold outside. The protagonist drives past a few roads which could set a location if you know them. “The long main road of Arklow was deserted, and there was just Gorey, Camolin and Ferns…” (Tóibín, lines 46-47), but that is not the most important thing. The significant part of the setting is the social circumstances. The flashbacks play a great part in this too since they are the ones which show the readers these particular circumstances. Without them, the story would have been a big mystery to the readers. With the help from the flashbacks, we are able to analyse the relationship between Mary and the rest of her family which helps us to understand who Mary is as a person.

The story is being told from the perspective of a 3rd person narrator. It is an omniscient narrator with an unlimited point of view. “She pictured as well their first sighting of the old two-storey house beside the school that her father had bought for them when they got married.” (Tóibín, lines 55-56). We as readers are entering Mary’s mind since this is something she is thinking and not saying. In this way, it is easier to picture and describe Mary as a person. The language is based upon her thoughts in her mind. They are reported thoughts and work as a good interplay to an understanding of Mary. We get to know what she is thinking and how she is dealing with different episodes of her life.

Mary is the protagonist of this story. She is the mother of David and the wife of Seamus. Mary did not spend as much time with David as she could have during his childhood.
“They were used to being free. Yet David did not really make the great change in their lives that she expected. Mrs Redmond… came in every day to help her and babysat at night if they wanted to go out… As David got bigger he began to spend more and more time with Mrs Redmond. Often, when Mary went down to the cottage to collect him, he did not want to come home.” (Tóibín, lines 13-19)
This might be the reason of David’s depression but Mary does not seem to notice or think of that. Mary and Seamus had been free for such long time that they did not even notice that they neglected David. Even when she is told by the doctors that her son suffers from depression 20 years later, she still cannot face reality with him and tries to avoid talking about it. Throughout the journey home she keeps asking him if he wants to sit in the front seat instead of asking how he is. It is not until they are almost home that she asks him how the stay at the hospital was.
“’What was it like, David, the hospital? I never could get any sense of it when we visited. I could never tell how you were… But it was the best thing at the time, wasn’t it? I mean there wasn’t anything else we could have done.’” (Tóibín, lines 94-101).
This is the first time she confronts him about his situation. She is starting to face reality and acknowledges that her son is depressed and that her husband is sick. In the end she realizes that there is nothing she can do about it now. “She noticed how strange her well-kept blonde hair looked beside the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth… It was time, she thought, to let the grey appear.” (Tóibín, lines 155-157). It is like she gets a revelation at this point. Like she admits to herself that she has made mistakes in the past. By saying that it is time to let the grey appear, she is accepting her situation and allowing the negative things to come out. She knows that it is not the importing thing. The important thing is to focus on her future and her family.

The main theme in this short story is as earlier written, acceptance. To learn how to accept everything that comes to you in life and every decision you make. Otherwise you might get stuck in the past just as Mary is in the beginning of the story. You have to learn how to accept it all to move forward because there will always be something new that you have to take a stand on. As some might say, life goes on.

So this story is about learning to accept your life as it is. We all have regrets, wishes about undoing some stuff or even handling a certain situation differently and that is okay as long as we learn to accept that what is done is done. When we learn to accept it all, we can let go of the past and look towards a brighter future. Colm Tóibín shows this message very clearly in this short story.