A Journey by Colm Toibin

Colm Tóibín's 'A journey' sets the theme of the story right from the beginning where a young boy, David, asks his mother "Mammy, how do people die?" and from her on after the story revolves around life from birth to death, and the acceptance of it.

The protagonist of the story is Mary who, together with her husband Seamus, has the son David. The reader is told that David has been suffering from a depression, and in the story's moment Mary is driving him home from the hospital.

On the car ride home Mary begins to have old memories and flashbacks running through her mind which puts the life that she has lived in perspective.

Hereby it is also discovered that the narrator is a 3rd person restricted narrator, since it follows Mary and her thoughts, and also it is not possible to see what either David or Seamus is doing when it doesn't have something to do with Mary.

The flashbacks Mary is having forces the story to jump in time which might confuse the reader, for an example we are told how Mary thinks about David being their only child, and then the story jumps to the moment where she found out that she was pregnant and what she was thinking.

"He was their only child, born after almost twenty years of marriage when Seamus and she had long given up hope of ever having children. At first she could hardly believe it and then was frightened; she asked herself why it had happened then and not years before but she could find no explanation."

This flashback is important because the reader understands how Mary had felt finding out that she was having David. Mary and Seamus was a middle aged couple at that time and they felt it was late to have a child and perhaps also felt that it was a bit inconvenient that Mary had gotten pregnant. This fact is considered to be a leading cause of David's depression because it seems like he has suffered from a lack of attention from his family, who didn't needed or wanted him in their lives, through his childhood.

When David was younger he used to run after his mother just like every other child asking questions to get attention and contact with her. But how it is described, with David running around after her, does not exactly seem like a healthy and mutual relationship between mother and child. The fact that David furthermore was babysat a lot of his childhood at another woman's, Mrs. Redmond's, house seems like he has gotten the needed attention elsewhere. Because Mrs. Redmond had just lost her husband when David was a baby, and therefore had a free empty space in her mind and heart, which she led David fill out, this also made her able to focus on David alone because she was missing someone.

Now Mary is wondering about when David suddenly stopped running after her and stopped asking questions and began to have his silences, but she could only remember