Essay on “A Journey” by Colm Tóibín.

1. Life is a never-ending circle, when someone dies, someone else is born.
It is a pattern that we all follow; it is a growth that we all go through. Though the choices we take in life make us individuals, there is a basic growth pattern that we all endure. Being born, growing into a teenager, into an adult, into an elderly, and last we will finally become one with the very earth we came from. The journey of life, from we are born till we die is one of the main themes treated in Colm Tóibíns short-story “A Journey”.

The short-story’s protagonist is a married, middle-aged woman named Mary. The story takes place in a car with her and her depressed son, whom she is driving home from the hospital. Before this we are told, in the beginning of the short-story, that David was born nearly after 20 years of marriage between Seamus (Mary’s husband) and herself. David’s first encounter with grave topics such as death was at a young age of merely four. He became the replacement of Mrs Redmond’s (a woman who lived in a nearby cottage) husband, who we are told passed away, just before David was born – this illustrates perfectly my point that when one life pass away another one enters the scene. Mrs Redmond began coming everyday to help Mary, and babysit at night if the she and Seamus were out of town. This is of course is Mrs Redmond’s way to get her mind on something else after the death of her husband, and in that way David becomes a sort of a substitution for her deceased husband. Mary is a loving mother, who despite of her sons’ condition sees through it.

On the journey in the car home from the hospital Mary tries to bond with David, but every time she lets her guards down, and tries to connect with him, she only gets a hurtful answer back. The part on the road were Mary dims the lights of her own car, only to be hit in the face