Sorry for the loss – essay

Sorry for the loss is a short story, written by Bridget Keehan in 2008. It is a story filled with contrasts, and tells the story of an innocent person’s courage, as she wanders through the harsh prison, to deliver some sad news to a killer-inmate.
The story is playing out in what seems like a classic county prison. Evie, the catholic chaplain, is assigned to tell the inmate, Victor Zamora, that his Nan dead. As she enters his cell, she immediately notices, that Victor is not a regular long-term prisoner. Even though he has been imprisoned for five years, for killing a fellow student with a butterfly knife, he does not have any long-term staleness, as you would expect people like him to have. His skin is still olive and his eyes are blue, and they still have spark. And when she brings him the news, he does not react, as you would expect. He does not start to cry or become upset, which would be the typical reaction. And at the same time, she wonders, how something with as peaceful a name as a butterfly knife can be used to perform such a horrible act.
The plot of this story proceeds chronologically, and we are thrown directly into the story without any form of introduction. There are no flashbacks, no flashforwards or foreboding. It is all happening as it would in real time, without any jumps in time.
It is a third person, limited omniscient narrator, which is following Evie’s point of view. It is a third person narrator, because terms such as “I say” or “I feel” are not used in the story. We can tell, that the narrative function is following Evie, because it describes how she is feeling and thinking: “As soon as she says these words she feels she has failed because it isn’t the right thing to say to him at this moment” (line 110). And that also makes it a limited omniscient narrator, because we only know Evie’s thoughts, and not everyone else’s.
The narrator in this story is objective. The narrator does not play an important role in this story, as most of the story itself it told by direct speech between the different characters. It introduces Evie and the current situation she is in, where afterwards it is mostly Evie and Victor who are telling the story as they talk to each other.
There are two important characters in this story, Evie and Victor. The main different in the narration is, that the narrator directly describes Evie, where as Victor is mostly described indirectly, both by Evie and the prison guard, but also as Evie and Victor is talking, the things he is saying and the way he is reacting to Evie.
Evie is the main character in this story. She is a catholic chaplain, which is a minister that represents the traditions and believes of a religion, just as a priest for example. Evie has been a chaplain for just over a year, and she is connected to the prison as their chaplain. Evie is very religious. An example is, that every time she has to walk through harsh hallways in the prison, she says a prayer to God to make her calm down and feel safe, and it gives her comfort. She compares her feeling of comfort to the feeling that heroin gives a drug addict: “She wonders if this is similar to the feeling junkies enjoy on heroin. She has heard some of the men describe it as like being wrapped in cotton wool, “all warm and lovely”” (line 38).
It is the first time she has an assignment like this alone. It makes her frustrated, that she has to tell Victor, that a member of his family has died. It makes her feel like she has failed. It is almost like she wants him to be sad, as if she feels like it is part of her job. She tries to do a better job by trying to make Victor pray for his Nan, but nothing helps. Victor does not want to show his feelings in front of her. It annoys her, that she cant do more to help Victor, which also makes her wants to leave all of a sudden.
Victor is a young man, who has been serving five years in prison so far, because he killed a fellow student with a butterfly knife. Victor is described by Evie as being a good looking, young man, who seems to be just the age for serving in prison, even though he has been in for five years: “She is relieved to discover that Victor Zamora is not he angry man from the computer room but a slight, good-looking boy who appears barely old enough to be in adult jail” (line 75). When Evie walks in to Victor’s cell, he asks, if she is from the SORRY course, which he has been signing up to. The SORRY course seems to be some kind of privilege, a course where inmates can talk freely about their crimes. He seems interested in joining the course.
As we learn about Victor, he seems less and less like the typical inmate. He seems well educated, very intellectual and spiritually curious and in touch with him self, not at all what you would see as a stereotypical inmate. You almost feel a little sympathy with him, until you read what he has done.
The story takes on a lot of contrasts. You have the quiet, peaceful catholic environment up against the harsh, intimidating and noisy prison. You have the pure, clean and innocent religious person up against the killer-inmate. You have the handsome, well-educated, young man, who is actually a vicious killer.
And then there is the butterfly knife. Evie is told by the end of the story, that Victor killed a fellow student with a butterfly knife because of a longer period with bullying. She does not understand why something that is made to “cut, slice and stab” has been named after a butterfly, which is one of the most peaceful animals, and at the same time one of the easiest to kill.
It seems that the contrasts in this story plays a huge role when you have to come up with a conclusion to the story. It might just be, that everything is not what it seems like. Every nice surface can hide something cruel or evil inside. Even though you look to be a nice, handsome and smart young man, you might still hide a killer inside, as it is the example in this story. It is easy to put up a façade to hide what you really have in mind. And if the façade is good enough, you might end up surprising a lot of people.