...No Angel by Bernie McGill The short story “No Angel” is written by Bernie McGill and published in 2010. The story is about loosing someone you love, and not wanting to let go of that someone. Loosing someone you love can be really hard. On the one hand you want to let that person go, and move on, but on the other hand you would like to remember that person. Maybe you are afraid of the loneliness and acknowledging their death, which will come when letting go. When you are so consumed with grief, it is often very hard to think straight, and you get yourself so convinced that your beloved one is still alive, and a part of your daily life, that you forget the reality. This is the kind of situation the main character Annie has to deal with in Bernie McGill’s story. Annie has lost her father, mother and brother, and is therefore left to be on her own. The pain of loosing her entire family has filled her with grief, and confusion. She is now caught up with the idea that her family is still alive, and therefor finds herself communicating with what she believes to be her father’s ghost. She and her father had a really close relationship before he died, mainly because it has always just been him and her: “Then it was just me and him, for nearly twenty-two years…” Because of all that time they spent together alone, she feels like he is still there with her, and talks to him like nothing has happened. The story is told in a first person narrative with a limited point of view...
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...all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time. Many people do not know what to expect when a Loved One passes away. It can be very difficult to overcome. We don’t want to forget them, but on the other hand, thinking about them could lead to eternal grieve. Have you ever lost a beloved and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? Well, I have… Then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish, you had back. You start talking to them in the belief, they can hear you, and sometimes you have those moments, where you can feel and see them. Exactly this situation, the main character has to deal with in Bernie McGill’s short story “No Angel” published in 2011. The main character of the story is Annie; she is a middle-aged woman, who is the only living member left of the family. The story is based around Annie talking to her father’s ghost; therefor it makes us believe that the supernatural does exist. Formerly she had a brother named Robbie, who was three years younger than her, also both of her parents were alive. Unidentified persons tragically beat Robbie to death, right after he had failed his driving test. The family lamented over his death, especially the mother, who mourned for six months where she barely spoke, until she one day suddenly dropped dead in the kitchen with no specific cause. Annie’s father thought it was because of her deep grieving,...
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...At some point in everyone’s life, we lose someone that is close to us. It is a very natural part of the human life and we all have to process it in our own different ways. Everyone has their own way of dealing with the loss of a loved one. In the short story “No Angel” from 2010, Bernie McGill processes this theme. In the short story, a girl called Annie loses her entire family. Bernie McGill writes about how she copes with her grief. In the following essay, I will analyze the author’s use of supernatural elements as a gateway between the living and the dead. The main character in ”No Angel” is a woman whose father has recently passed away. We are told that she has a boyfriend/fiancé . Even though she is technically being “haunted” by her dead father, she does not seem scared or “angry” in any way. She seems to understand the supernatural things that are happening to her. Probably because of the things that happened to her earlier in her life, with her brother and mother being dead , and now her father too. It is as if nothing can really surprise her anymore. She is drawn towards people with a higher self-esteem than her, like her brother Robbie. Which is also why she went out with Thomas who she says reminds her of Robbie. The reason for this can be the lack of bravery and boldness in herself. Even though the main character isn’t described as “lonely”, it seems very possible that she is not yet over her fathers’ death, which might also be the reason why she sees her...
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...No Angel By Caroline Serup Gregersen 3.a The short story ” No Angel” is written by Bernie McGill from 2011. The story takes place in Northern Ireland. A limited 1st person narrator tells the story because the main character Annie tells the story from her point of view. The short story starts in media res. The short story is about how people handle death and the effect it has on a person. The short story circles about the main character Annie who sees her dead father´s ghost. In this essay there is an analysis and interpret the short story´s composition, supernatural elements, theme and the relationship between Annie and her father. The composition in the short story contains flashbacks because it jumps back and forth in time. In the short story there are some streams of consciousness, and that is why the chronological order has been unregulated. There is harmony between the start and the end. The use of flashbacks has an effect - it gives a full picture of the theme to understand the main character and her problems dealing with her father’s dead. It is a common element for a short story to have flashbacks. “The first time I saw my father after he died, I was in the shower, hair plastered with conditioner, when the water stuttered and turned cold. He was at the sink in front of the misted-up mirror with the tap running, his back to me. It was two weeks after his funeral. His things were all where he’d left them. ” This is the first flash back in time in the short story...
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...No Angel By Bernie McGill Death is inevitable and death is a natural part of human life. At some point in our lives, we have or will experience losing an acquaintance. To loose someone you love can be difficult to overcome. The question is how we handle the loss of a loved one. In the short story, “No Angel” Bernie McGill tells about how a woman handle her grief after she has lost her whole family. As written previously, a woman loses her family tragically. The first family member she loses is her seven teen year old little brother, Robbie. He was murdered on a cold December night. After short six months, she loses her mother, who could not bear the grief of losing her only son. The only person, who is left in the woman’s life for now, is her father. Twenty-two years past the death of her mother, her father also passed away, because his lungs did not work anymore. The woman is now going through a very difficult time. The loss of her family, make her create her own vision of her dead family, so she can talk to them. The short story is told in first person narrative, where the narrator is our character. The point of view are limited because we do not hear the name of the woman, but we hear her inner and outer thoughts. Among other things, the short story says that the woman has a good lecturing job. We hear that she is attentive soft spoken and afraid of darkness. The composition is not chronological because there are flashback and flash forward. The story starts...
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...No Angel By Bernie McGill Be it family or friends, we are all going to lose someone that are close to us. It is inevitable, therefore a very natural part of our life and we all have to process the grief in our own different ways. Everyone has his or her own way of dealing with the loss of a loved one. Some want to get liberated from the pain and loss. They try to compensate from it by forgetting. Others want to keep the memory of the ones they have lost, because they fear the loneliness, which can make it difficult to let the lost ones go. In the short story “No Angel”, Bernie McGill processes this theme of grief. ”No Angel” is told in first person narrative in a limited point of view. This gives us detailed information about the main characters feelings and thoughts, but we only see the events from the characters point of view. This can be a disadvantage since the specific and circumstantial information given from the character can be unreliable. The main characters is a woman named Annie, whose father has recently passed away. Although her father technically is haunting her, she does not seem to be scared or angry in any way. We have to decide for ourselves whether the ghosts are real or merely a product of Annie’ mind. The composition is jumping in time with flashbacks and flash-forwards. Some of the telling is streams of consciousness, and for that reason, the chronological order has been unregulated. As an extension of this, the author tributes the short story...
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...No Angel When you lose some of your beloved, it can be awfully difficult to move on with your own life. If they were a part of your everyday life, it's not abnormal to feel like something is missing, and a feeling like this can cause a confused mind. Some people move on like nothing has happened when a family member dies, but others don't know how to keep thinking straight. At times it can be dreadfully painful to think about dead people you used to love, and some people even envision the dead standing in front of them and think that they are actually able to have a conversation with them. "No Angel" is a short story written by Bernie McGill in 2011. The theme of the story is "the loss of beloved family members", and it shows an interesting example of a persons' life and thoughts after this person loses her nearest family members. "No Angel" is briefly about Annie, who is the protagonist of the story. Annie tries to live a normal and stereotypical life after her brother, mother and father pass away, but her father continuously appears in front of her after his death, and this makes it hard for Annie to live a normal life. Annie tells about her father's appearances through flashbacks. The plot of the story takes place in the 2000's, and is told by a first person narrator, Annie. The plot is written in chronological order, but there occur several flashback throughout the entire story. The story is set in in Northern Ireland, where McGill was born, and the environment there...
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...------------------------------------------------- No Angel Summary “No Angel” is a novel written by Bernie McGill, and takes place in contemporary Northern Ireland. The story is about a woman named Annie, who has lost her mom, dad and brother. Thru the story she keeps seeing and hearing her dad, and we hear about her and how her family died. In the end Annie sees her whole family gathered together. Characterization We are dealing with 5 characters in the story. The main character is Annie, who we don’t know much facts or details about. We know that she is an iris woman who has lost her family. We are told that Annie’s seventeen years old brother Robbie was beaten to death – “The coroner said he thought a car had hit him: after the beating, he said, when he had been left on the road” Their mother are in a lot of grief, because of her sons dead, and six months after the murder she all of a sudden dies – “Mum lasted six months of barely speaking, food hardly passing her lips. She dropped like a stone one day in the kitchen; never spoke again”.After that it was just Annie and her dad for twenty years, until his lungs gave away, and he died too. Annie has a boyfriend named Thomas. After the meetings and jibes from her father about Thomas, it downs on her, that her and Thomas aren’t going to last. –“We didn’t last. I think it was Thomas’s confidence I fell for”. This is one of the things that show Annie needs some kind of guidance in her life, and as soon as she discover Thomas...
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...A. No Angel Everybody knows how hard it is to loose somebody you love, and many experience grief and it is not a fun thing. Everyone react differently with his’ or her’s sorrows. It can be a very painful experience to loose someone you love and someone cannot handle to be alone. Many want to get rid of the pain, and try to forget it all, and some want to hold on to the memories about their lost ones, because they are afraid to be alone. The loneliness even makes some people see things that don’t exit like ghost and dead people. Things like this are presented in this story, “No Angel” written by Bernie McGill. The story ”No Angel” is written in narrative, first person. Everything that happens, we see through the main characters eyes. Her name is Annie. About the composition in the story, it is jumping in the time. There are a lot of flashbacks and even flash forwards too. The first flashback, the main character meets her dad for the first time after his death. She is in the bathroom when he appears, and he is small talking with her. The daughter knows everything about her father, and we know that by the detailed and specified description of the dead father. That tells us that she was very close to him. After this we immediately jump over to another flashback, where he appears on a train on it’s way to Belfast. In this flashback we get to know the main characters family a little better. This scene indicates how important the jumping in time and the flashbacks is, because...
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...No Angel Losing a close relative is something no one is ever really prepared for. It is as well different from individual to individual how you react to the loss of a dear one. On the one hand, you would like to remember them and still let them be a part of your life but on the other hand, you have to move on for the sake of yourself. Living in the past has never proved useful. Many experience this dilemma thus many struggle to decide when the time is to return to the daily life and continue living. This is a painful time Sometimes, the loss of beloved ones can be so heartbreaking that you might still see them in your daily life despite the fact that they are already dead. This could give you the comfort of them still being around, while you can still carry out conversations and feel like they are alive. The protagonist, Annie, experiences this supernatural situation in the short story “No Angel” written by Bernie McGill in 2011. The story is told in a first person narrative with a limited point of view, where the reader has full access to the protagonist’s thoughts, however because we are dealing with a first person narrator, we do not hear the story from a different perspective. Thus first person narrators can debatably be defined as unreliable. Another aspect of using a first person narrator is that the reader is able to identify oneself with the protagonist because the reader is basically inside her head. The loss of a family member is a devastating situation, which...
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...is no "right" way to grieve, there is no answer to how each one of us will heal from the feelings of sadness, anger, loss and loneliness. There are a lot of reasons to be in grief, but the most intense grief usually comes from the death of a love one. Feelings such as sorrow, sadness, guilt, regret, anxiety, fear and helplessness isn't uncommon to go through after you lost a loved one. There is no way to know how long the grief will go on. But overtime the intense grief and sorrow will subside. In 1969 Elizabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the 5 stages of grief: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I think we all can agree that these are stages we go through when we have lost a loved one. In the short story "No Angel" written by Bernie McGill, in 2010, our main character Annie, goes through grief and loneliness after she lost her father. The short story is written in first person narrative, we see the story through the main character's eyes whose name is Annie. The compositions is jumping in time between, present and flashbacks. The story starts in the middle of the story, media res. The first event is the first time Annie sees her father after his death. She sees him in the bathroom, where they are small talking. Right after this we jump right into a new flashback, which is the second time she sees her father after his death. Here we learn a bit more about the main character, we learn about how her mother and father used to take the train. We also learn...
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...No Angel The short story No Angel is written by the Bernie McGill in 2010. She is an author who lives in Northern Ireland, where the story also takes place. It is from the anthrology The Best British Short Stories 2011. The story is about grief, loneliness and how to recover from a death of a loved one. People got different ways to move on, but no matter what, it is terribly painful to lose a loved one, because you suddenly are alone. On the one hand you recover by trying to forget about the pain the loss has brought, but on the other hand you want to remember the one who passed away, because of the fear of loneliness and because the death is hard to accept. Others don’t want to accept the fact that they’re gone and will never be here again, and thereby they find a rather special way to keep the memory of the lost person. They create the lost one(s) inside their head, and pretending they see the dead(s) as ghosts or angels. This makes them able to talk to them and get advices from their beloved, even though they are no longer here. This is the way our main character of No Angel is using to handle her sorrows of her family’s death. The main characters name is Annie. You get to know it when the father says “Have you forgotten what they did to your brother, Annie?...”(p. 3, l. 63). Annie has lost her brother and both of her parents and deals with being left on her own without them to support, guide and, most of all, love her. She still sees them after they’re dead as angels...
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...No Angel Losing a family member, a friend or a loved one can be very painful and difficult experience to overcome and accept. On the one hand, we want to remember the one who passed away, but on the other we don’t want to accept the fact that they’re gone and will never be with us again. Sometimes, our loss can even be so great that our imagination creates person who passed away and makes us able to talk to them as if nothing ever happened, as if they never passed away. This is exactly the case of the main character of the short story “No Angel” from 2010 by Bernie McGill, who deals with the loneliness and grief of losing her family. The short story is told from a first person limited point of view, and the events are seen through the eyes of our main character, whose name we aren’t told. We jump back and forward in time with flashbacks and flash-forwards, and there’s no chronological order to the story. This is further proven when the story starts in medias res with a very important event. The story starts with a flash back in time to when our main character meets her father in the bathroom for the first time after he had passed away. Our main character is taking a shower, when her dad suddenly appears in in the bathroom, standing in front of the sink and the mirror with a razor shaving. Her dad is described in a way that indicates she knows him very well, from top to toe: “He looked more or less the same. When he turned his face to scrape the razor along his jaw, I could...
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...Engelsk A Studentereksamen 1. delprøve, uden hjælpemidler kl. 9.00 - 10.00 stx132-ENG/A-22082013 122050.indd 1 Torsdag den 22. august 2013 kl. 9.00 - 14.00 02/07/13 13.38 122050.indd 2 02/07/13 13.38 Side 1 af 8 sider Nedenstående rubrikker udfyldes. Efter prøven afleveres dette hæfte med din besvarelse til en ilsynsførende. t stx132-ENG/A-22082013 Skolens/kursets navn: Elevens/kursistens navn: Klasse/hold: Elevens/kursistens nummer: Elevens/kursistens underskrift: Tilsynsførendes signatur: Denne delprøve besvares uden brug af hjælpemidler. Besvarelsen afleveres kl. 10.00 122050.indd 3 02/07/13 13.38 Side 2 af 8 sider Besvar opgaverne i A – D A Ret fejlene i følgende sætninger, og forklar på dansk dine rettelser. Brug relevant grammatisk/faglig terminologi. Der er kun én fejl i hver sætning. Skriv den korrekte sætning på linjerne nedenunder. 1. Two lightning bolts hitted an Airbus A380 in a terrible thunderstorm. 2. Modern historians claim that the king reigned successful for 17 years. 122050.indd 4 02/07/13 13.38 Side 3 af 8 sider 3. He is carpenter, but he would very much like to work in a bank. 4. Some scientists objects to the idea of artificial intelligence. 5. The police had given up finding the ones whom had robbed the bank. 122050.indd 5 02/07/13 13.38 Side...
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...We all have different ways to deal with grief, longing and loneliness. In this essay I am going to analyze and interpret the short story “No Angel” by Bernie McGill from 2010. It’s a story writ-ten with a very unique spoken language and with an unusual composition, which I will de-scribe even further later in this essay. Additionally, I will make a characterization of the per-sons, get around the use of supernatural elements and in the end explain how I have inter-preted the short story. The story is written in a 1st person narrator, who is Annie – the main character. The spoken language is unique because the story takes place in contemporary Northern Ireland, and the writer has chosen to show the Irish dialect in the spoken language. The language, especially when the father speaks, contains a lot of slang and unusual ways to pronounce the words. An example of this, appears in this quotation: ““What’s that oul’ shite you’re listening to?” he said, and near put me off the road. A twitter of a laugh: “That would deave you,” and his arm reached out, and turned down the dial.” (Page 5, line 133-135). The fact that the short story is written from the narrative’s perspective, gives the reader an opportunity to feel like he is inside An-nie’s head. Her narrative language is not very formal; as an example she calls her father “Dad-dy”. The story begins in medias res, because the reader is thrown directly into the action when Annie sees her dead father for the first time in the...
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