Paradise by Edna O’Brien, 1968
The magic trick:
Adding texture to the point of view represented by including the complete text of a letter written by the protagonist to her mother
Island Week on SSMT continues with this classic story from Edna O’Brien. Our protagonist is on a luxury island vacation with her new millionaire boyfriend.
The only problem is that he’s got a dozen other friends in the seaside house with them, mucking everything up. And I guess the other, more important, problem to note is that he’s not really her boyfriend. They’re still in that awkward, “will they/won’t they?” middle-ground stage.
The story is told in the third-person, but it definitely gives us insight into her point of view. We see the guests, the pool (she is learning how to swim for the first time during the visit), the sea, the harbor, the house, the kitchen, everything with hints of her feelings, insecurities, and worries in the narration.
This goes to another level, though, near the end of the story, when the narration breaks to give us the text of a letter she has written to her mother. There are no major revelations, but the shift is enough to make the reader take notice. What were hints before in the narration become all out judgments in the letter. We get a much stronger, solidified idea of how she is seeing things, having read the letter.
It’s an interesting way to mix and match a character’s point of view.
And that’s quite a trick on O’Brien’s part.
The selection:
The sun filtered by the green needles and fell and made play on the dense clusters of brown nuts. They never ridicule nature, she thought, they never dare. He came and stood behind her, his hand patting her bare pale shoulder. A man who was not holding a camera pretended to take a photograph of them. How long would she last? It would be uppermost in all their minds.
“We’ll take you on the boat tomorrow,” he said. They cooed. They all went to such pains, such excesses, to describe the cruiser. They competed with each other to tell her. They were really telling him. She thought, I should be honest, say I do not like the sea, say I am an inland person, that I like rain and roses in a field, thin rain, and through it the roses and the vegetation, and that for me the sea is dark as the shells of mussels, and signifies catastrophe. But she couldn’t.
“It must be wonderful” was what she said.
“It’s quite, quite something,” he said shyly.
As always, join the conversation in the comments section below, on SSMT Facebook or on Twitter @ShortStoryMT.
Subscribe to the Short Story Magic Tricks Monthly Newsletter to get the latest short story news, contests and fun.
Short Story Magic Tricks 