A Gap of Sky

Youth is the time, where people find their identity. It's a turning point in life, where choices must be made. In Anna Hope's "A Gap of Sky" the 19-year-old girl Ellie not only makes choices; she regrets them as well.

The story takes place in London on a Monday afternoon. The main character Ellie wakes up in her bed after a night with partying, drinking alcohol and doing drugs. This way of living doesn't harmonize with how she should live, because she's in the middle of a university course at University College London. Because of a lack of application, she has already gotten a letter from the school, which says that they have to reconsider her place on the course. This night she has to finish an essay, whose hand-over already had been extended. In other words, this is a day of her life, which can have decisive consequences for the rest of her life.

The third person narrator makes Ellie's thoughts a very central part of the story, and some-times the text even looks like a precise account of her spontaneous thoughts. An example of Ellie's flow of thoughts is when she discusses with herself, what the consequences of not doing the essay would be: "... she's going to do this essay. And if not? Will they really kick her off the course? Or will she have to repeat the year?" (ll. 47-48). The main part of the story is written in simple present, which makes the text sound like a complete enumeration of the character's actions that Monday. A fact that supports this is that the lapse of time is never broken. All in all the narrative style is making the reader get a feeling of reading Ellie's mind. The only thing that talks against that the text is a flow of Ellie's thoughts, is that the narrator is a third person and not a first person. This may has something to do with the thematic devel-opment, which will be discussed later in this essay.

It isn't clear in the text how long Ellie has been doing drugs. "How the fuck did she manage to sleep for so long," (l. 15) indicates, that she is surprised of the effects of taking drugs. But later in the text, the narrator's flow of her thoughts sounds very familiar with the different names of drugs and their effects: "...and then more coke arriving and - K, didn't they do some K? They must have done, because Ellie remembers the light..." (l. 20). Whether her drug abuse is new or old, she is presented as disappointed of herself when she wakes up in her room: ""Blaaaargh," she breathes; sticks her tongue out. Jesus," (l. 10). The fact that she can't even stand up but has to clamber supports the presentation of her as pitiful.

In the beginning of the short story, the experience of taking drugs is presented as a contrast to everyday life. When Ellie and her friends are on drugs, everyone are laughing and "pissing themselves like it was the funniest thing ever," (l. 25) and when they go back to the real world by "the fucking rush-hour tube" they're reminded of how unhappy a normal life would be. El-lie's ritually coffee-making the next day, which is retold in keywords like a recipe, supports this grieved look on everyday life.

Throughout the story Ellie goes through a personal development. Already in the beginning when she wakes up, she's aware of the fact that she has almost kicked herself out of college by doing drugs the night before. But at this time her motivation for doing the essay is that she doesn't want to waste