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Essay - Reconciliation

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The short story Reconciliation was written in 2006 by the author Polly Clark. The story gently touches the area of which you go from sane to insane. After reading the story you could ask yourself; what is sanity? And where do we draw the line from a person being sane, to a person being insane? The question about sanity is a valid subject to discuss after reading “Reconciliation”, because the main character and narrator Laura seems to be quite strange and she doesn’t seem to know how to interact with other people. These things are shown very early on – as well as the first small signs of her being on the edge of sanity. At first she forgets to bring proper footwear on the first day at her new job. That combined with her not washing her hair properly, but instead doing a rather unsuccessful (her own words) “dry wash”, could be blamed on her just being a rather untidy person. The first real sign of her being on the edge of sanity is when she explains why she is walking around the office bare footed. She blames it on mountaineering which – let’s face it – is the worst excuse possible. Other signs that show that her mind is rather dysfunctional are the narrator’s use of imagery in her head. She compares her husband – Vernon – with a rhinoceros and a turtle and she describes his shoulders as being like branches in a gale. All of this could be her way of making him lesser human and therefore making herself seem more normal. She even refers to her lacking the skills of being normal when she says: “I hope he realises how much planning, thought, how much normality it took for me to be here today”. She is in someway envious of her husband as a human being and the way he acts in certain situations, like the way he is good at interacting with other people.
The question of her sanity is also revisited later in the short story when she is being put to work matching numbers on two

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