Elephant - Polly Clark

Have you ever wondered how your life in the end will turn out to be? Have you at any time taken control of you own life or don't you care? These questions are hard to answer, but it concerns us all. Sometimes human beings are very focused on the beginning of their lives - they forget what will happen in the end - they forget that it's possible to control and create your own life and your own end. Rather than doing what is expected of you or what you are supposed to do. All this and even more is what the story Elephant is all about - it's a story about a man who lives for his job as a writer, forgetting to live his own life.

Polly Clark is a Canadian writer who is famous for her poetry - her poetry explores human experiences from ecstasy to grief. Polly Clark has taken a deeper look inside the human mind with the short story Elephant, which was published in 2006.

This short story is focused on the main character, who is a man called William. It starts in medias res and takes place in the present, he writes on a computer, which is modern technology. The story has a chronological structure, only with one flashback. The point of view is from a third person narrator, who knows what William is thinking and feeling. The narrator tells the story with mainly direct descriptions "William wrote biographies of pop singers"(line21, page one). With this sentence the reader knows the main characters profession, and furthermore we later find out that William would have preferred to write about male film stars from the golden age, rather than pop singers. We also know that William accepts his situation, "Recently, sometime after Christine, he had come to realize it was better this way: if you care too much for your subject your little book might not be able to accommodate all you really wanted to say. To have a lot to say, and then to be unable to say it, in the way you wanted - that would, be much worse than this (line 25, page 1)". This quotation explains William's feelings towards his writing - in a way it's fine that he writes about topics he has no interest in, than to write about something he cared about and not be able to write all he really wanted to say. William thinks the pop singers he writes about are exactly the same: superficial girls with no or little talent.

One of the problems in this text is the fact that William has a writer's block, which has lasted for many weeks. It's described as something physical like a haze in his mind. Writing is Williams employment, but for him it isn't a creative process it's only a job, "No one ever described William's writing as creative or important but with things on your mind it was as impossible to write unimportant, forgettable things as it was, he ima¬gined, to write Ulysses "(line 13, page 1). He seeks to forget the real life and doesn't take any control for what he wants to do with it. He lives in his own little world isolated from the real world because of his job.

Except for the pop singers William writes about, the only real person we are introduced to is his wife Ginny. Unlike William is Ginny a controlling woman telling her husband what to do and what not to do "Just enough time to think some appropriate thoughts" (line 59, page 2). We don't hear anything about Ginny's appearance, but we know she smells like paper and toner, which indicates that she works in some kind off from work. She visits William in the middle of the day and she lies to her employer to get an hour off. The reason for this visit is because it's the right time