Compass and Torch by Elizabeth Baines
The main theme of the short story “Compass and Torch” is the need of accept and attention from a parent. We all need to feel accepted or noticed, especially from our parents. Every single person have an unconscious need or desire to feel the approval from others. The desire to feel this from our parents derives from the feeling and urge to make them proud, to prove to them that they did not fail raising us; that we is worth the trouble. This need for approval follows us all till we someday decides that approval from our self is enough. In “Compass and Torch”, this desire is described through a young boy’s perspective. The boy experiences an extremely absent father, which barely notices him, throughout the whole text the boy seeks for the acceptance from his father.
Torn between his parents caused by their divorce, the young boy feels split. The parent’s hatred for each other sparks between them as explosives ready to blow up, which has a huge impact on their son. The boy lives with his mother and her new boyfriend, Jim, who in the boy’s eyes never can replace his father in any way. His absent father is only infrequent visiting him, and does not play a huge impact on his son’s daily life. It is clearly that the boy’s mom sees the father’s non-attendance, as only another way to mock on him, she is defiantly angry with him maybe reasoned their divorce. In contraction to the boy’s point of view where the father represents his hero, his role model.
Unfortunately, the boy sees the world from a bit of an equivocal angle, where he not only sees the bright and positive points of things but also the darker and negative points. It appears difficult for the boy to separate and distinguish this from each other. This becomes clear for instance in the way that he observes his mother, since it becomes obvious that the boy cannot distinguish