Engelsk Terminsprøve

Niklas Ritter 3.K

Tirsdag d. 3 marts 2015

A -­‐ Analytical Essay of Sarah Butler’s short story ”Number 40”

“Number 40” is a short story by Sarah Butler written in 2012 and is from the anthology The Picador Book of 40. Melissa is the main character of the story. Even though it is told from her perspective, a third person narrator tells the story. As we learn through the story, Melissa is a very forgetful person and also she seems very distracted. In the beginning she forgets her phone on the table at home and later she walks up to the wrong front door and tries to open it with her own keys. We don’t get to know many details about her, such as her age, but at some point she is optical described as pale skinned and dark eyed and “(…) her face was pasty white”. Also we get to know about her capability of compromises in her relationship with Simon “(…) but relationships were about compromise, and she was, at least, good at that.” Work, family and friends are not introduced to the readers either, so it must be rather unimportant for the understanding of this story. It is mentioned briefly that she cannot miss a team meeting, but it is not further explained what kind of meeting it was. The opening of the story starts directly in medias res, without any introduction and this makes Sarah Butler capture the reader’s interest already just from the beginning The short describes a day in Melissa’s life. We, as readers, don’t get to know where or when exactly the story takes place. But we can assume that it takes place somewhere in Great Britain, due to the fact that the author is living in England and also the address on which Melissa lives with her boyfriend Simon “40 Rossendale Road” sounds very British and is most likely located in England. Melissa has bought a house together with her boyfriend Simon that is still in renovation progress “The house had already endured eleven months of (…) re-­‐wiring, re-­‐plumbing, re-­‐plastering, re-­‐painting, re-­‐flooring”. There are a few flashbacks in the story, such as where we get to know about the holydays Melissa and Simon have been on, a Greek island named Santorini. She is dreaming about taking on another holyday with him again but then starts realising that they had agreed on finishing the house first. Throughout the whole story she is thinking a lot about Simon and how he would respond to different kinds of her questions and statements: “Do you remember Santorini? She’d say, and he’d laugh and say of course (…)”; “He would point out that they’d agreed to wait (…)”; “You’re losing your marbles, Simon would have said”. It is interesting to see how certain things to some certain extend makes her think about her boyfriend. For example when she is sitting in the bus and a woman reminds her of some other woman that went out for having a cigarette with Simon, or later in

Engelsk Terminsprøve

Niklas Ritter 3.K

Tirsdag d. 3 marts 2015

the story she even thinks that another man that has similarities with her boyfriend, actually is Simon. It may be quite obvious why she so badly wishes to get away from home to another vacation with him. It must be because she can’t focus at all given that she constantly is thinking about her boyfriend and also she forgets a lot of things, even her beloved one’s phone number. Melissa seems to become to some extend mentally ill, such as if she digs in to an imaginary world where places and circumstances have changed. She is walking up towards wrong front doors and finally in a mysterious way her house on Rossendale Road number 40 is gone and has simply disappeared. But also very mysteriously the man that she was led to believe was Simon, walked into his house where she could recognize a dark wooden table with spindly legs, just the same one as Simon had bought for their house. So not only this man resembled her boyfriend, but also his interior? Due to the fact that Melissa can’t even find her house, it is hard to tell if the story is fictional and takes place in an imaginary world or that the story actually is based on a true event and that she just is going insane. Many different colours such as “white steps; green, pale grey, yellow paint, thin silver, twists of colour” but also numbers “two, four, six, eight, 36, 38, 42” symbolise her confused mind. Also the dark vanished wooden table appears a couple of times in the story. It might be a symbol for the change of her state of mind. In the beginning of the story, the table is described as something she actually is seeing in reality, it states for her mind to be functioning normally. The second time she is only thinking about the table, but it is nothing she actually sees. So this is where her mind starts to dig in to this world of imagination. Finally she again recognizes the table in the stranger’s man’s house, this is where her mind is really confused and to her nothing seems, as it should, and this is also the point of where the story simply ends. The ending is very open and ambiguous, as a reader you might expect an explanation of why she can’t find her house. Nothing linked to the mysterious disappearance of Melissa’s home is revealed, and this effect surprises the reader and makes him wonder what might have been the problem. Sarah Butlers message of the story could be that it is healthy to take some time off once in a while, before your mind starts to get insane and you start imagining things that don’t exist.