Owl
By Jackie Kay

Is it possible to live in the past back when you were ten when you really are in the middle age? Is it healthy to be stuck in the childhood and not wanting to move on? That is what the main character in Jackie Kay’s short story Owl does. This essay will focus on the narrative technique, the contrasts and what the title can symbolize.

The short story is written by a first person narrator which in this case means that the story is told through one of the main characters, Barn’s/Anita’s, eyes. It is written in past tense and is focused on Barn’s angle of the story and the reader experiences the events through her. The reader is for the reason of that trusting the narrator because one is made to feel closer and friendlier with the narrator because the reader and the narrator look through the same eyes. This dominates not only the point of view but also the plot. Some of the text is a flashback from Barn’s and Tawn’s childhood where we get to know them as children.

There are many contrasts in the short story Owl. One of them is the contrast between being a child and a grown up. The story is divided in two. The first part of the text focuses on the childhood of Barn and Tawn when they were nine and ten years old. The second part takes place when they are adults and in their forties. They are stuck in the past even though they have grown up: “And maybe after that we could go back to our names, to calling ourselves our real names. (Though I doubt we’d ever do that. It would sound like we were angry at each other, (…).)”. By calling each other the same nicknames they had as children they hang on to the past. The fact that they do this can indicate that they aren’t satisfied with their grown up lives and therefore uses the past as an imaginary world where there are no bigger problems in life.
There is a contrast between Barn and Anita.