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The Arena

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The Arena

The short story ”The Arena”, written in 2008 by Martin Golan, circles around an unnamed protagonist and narrator, who is driving his son to the Arena, where he is to make his bus for the lacrosse trip. The themes of the story involve the strong bond between child and parent, escaping ones past and self-acknowledgement. The assignment partly focuses on the way the story is structured and on the use of contrasts as well as an interpretation and analysis of the story.

“The Arena” is written with a special focus on the protagonist, who is the father of two children, one with his current wife, and one who suffered an early death with his last wife. It takes place in the suburbs of New Jersey and the protagonist has been living there for some time. The story is of little dialogue as the story wanders and dwells in the mind of the protagonist, as an inner dialogue of questioning his self-realization: “… the smell of toast, of longing itself, or is it of memory?”. In the start of the story, he describes a Arena in town, in which he is going to with his son: “It’s a circular, roughly built structure of steel and cinder block that houses an ice-skating rink… I could never relax… The Arena somehow manages to be too cold and too hot at the same time….”. He seems quite discomforted and ambivalent by the surroundings of the Arena, which is somehow connected to his past. The drive he and his son is on to the Arena starts out early in the morning, and as the story proceeds, the narrating protagonist quickly engage in a narrow descriptive language that focuses on the surroundings at dawn: “We glide through darkness that is not real darkness but the early morning kind, darkness about to lift… [The dawn] feels as if I am breaking through, that I am, at long last, seeing”. The contrast of colours is widely used in the short story. As they drive at dawn, darkness and

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