Mount Pleasant

Mount Pleasant

The kid's imagination has no limit, and can turn everything into supernatural beings. No bad thing exists - a world where sheets become ghosts and old pictures come to life. Kids incorporate their vivid imagination in their games thereby making the world a more interesting, fun and even terrifying place to be. In the story "Mount Pleasant" written by Mary-Louise Buxton in 2005, we are shown how the world looks from a little girl, called Elisabeth's, point of view.

The short story is told in the explicit first person. That means the story is told by Elisabeth, and everything we know, we know through Elisabeth. That makes our knowledge limited and we don't know anything she doesn't.

Buxton employs several literary techniques in her short piece. By setting the story in the point of view of a young kid, she immediately establishes the narrator as unreliable. Young kids see "things" all the time, and generally speaking, adults do not take these claims too seriously.

If a little girl around Elizabeth's age told you that she thought that her house was being haunted by a photograph, would you believe her?

Buxton never directly tells us that Elizabeth has a short attention span, though we know that she does because the narration jumps around. For instance, on page 3, starting on line 85, Elizabeth switches from telling us about the picture to reminiscing about the town and charging up a bill on her mother's tab buying candy. All throughout page 3, especially between lines 100 and 110, there are abrupt changes between the past and present. These are time shifts, which are often employed when using the technique or style called stream of consciousness. By using this technique, Buxton reminds the reader that Elizabeth is young and perhaps her way of experiencing things, are not to be trusted. Since we only see what Elizabeth sees, we don't necessarily see the objective truth. Lena, Mammy, and Daddy might all have very different versions of the same story.

Elizabeth's childish language, also reinforce the fact of the unreliable narrator.

For example, she says "babby" instead of baby , uses the phrase "eenie meenie miny mo" and invents her own proper names for objects and concepts, such as "the Look" and "Granny 'Omi's Duckering Ball." The inventive language also suggests a girl with a vivid imagination, who plays with the world around her.

Elizabeth is a rebellious little girl of about six to 8 years. We know that from the phrase where she talks about the boy on the photograph: "maybe nine or ten, not much older than I am." Her young age and rebellious attitude are shown in the very first line of the story, where it says: "Mammy'll take to me with a wooden spoon if she