Sorry for the Loss

Sorry for the Loss

Bridget Keehan

Sorry for the Loss is a short story written by, Bridget Keehan in 2008. In Keehan’s story, a minister is surprised when she meets an inmate, who does not match the expectations she had. Stereotypes are a common thing among us today. They make the world easier to understand, but most of the time our expectations do not match the reality. ^[a]

Our main character is presented in the short story as a catholic minister named Evie. Evie has been working in the prison for about five years. The prison is filled with noise and brutality and Evie finds this intimidating, and therefore she tries to find comfort in prayer. In the beginning of the story, Evie has to deliver her first death notice to an inmate, whose name is Victor. Victor’s grandmother has just passed away. Evie wishes to be a good minister and wants to do everything right. But because of how demanding it is to work in a prison, Evie uses defense^[b] mechanisms to cut herself off from the brutal life in the prison. Evie has a way of seeing all of the inmates as dangerous villains. Evie thinks that it is easier to judge the prisoners “than to relate to them since the situation they are in is so hard. Because of this, Evie does not understand how Victor reacts when she deliver the bad news. Evie immediately thinks that Victor is going to cry, but he does not. Victor is a “slight, good looking boy” (l. 75) this comes as a surprise as Evie thought that Victor was a huge brutal man. Victor willingly plays a woman, by the name of Cordelia; in Shakespeare’s play king Lear. It does not matter to Victor whether he is a boy or a girl in the play. Victor despises Cordelia for being a pot-head^[c] (l. 106). The moral of Victor is shown in the way he describes how brutal it is that his neighbour kills pigeons. Furthermore, Victor is polite and asks Evie to sit down when she is visiting him in his cell. All of Evie’s prejudices against the inmates were ruled out after she had met Victor. She expected a brutal, primitive cave man, but Victor is, in reality, a polite, intellectual boy.

The way Victor is talking shows that he is a product of the prison society. His vocabulary is dominated by slang “Must have heard me talking “bout his mate!”” (l. 135). Because of his use of slang his citing of Shakespeare is even more surprising and ironic “, Why would a dog, a horse, a pigeon have a life and Nan no breath at all?”. (l. 101). This quote shows, how Victor mourns the loss of his grandmother and finds her death unjust. Evie does not understand this. In the prison, Evie uses simple language to handle the prisoners. By using descriptions that match her expectations and prejudices: “prisoners are shunted off” (l. 20), the prisoner's name is “bellowed” (l. 24) and they” are “banged up” (l. 12) in their prison cells.

Evie’s description of the prison is awful and noisy “Evie considers it a wonder the thick stone walls ^[d]that separate this world from the outside contain the noise” (l. 29-30). The prison is a whole nother^[e] form of society that is parted from the rest of the world. Violence and danger is a daily part of the prison. Evie is a representation of the church and Victor represent the prison. Because of how the depictions of the characters differ from the general opinion or view, the reader is forced to rethink the idea of these institutions.

In the short story, the reader is presented with Evie and her thoughts about the events “She is not sure who Victor E22A is” (l. 2). A limited third person narrator tells the story from Evie’s interpretation of the events. Because it is an explicit narrator, the things the reader is presented with might not be consistent with reality.

The text has a classic composition of a short story. The story starts out with an introduction, which actually also a summary of the plot. Because “Evie has to tell Victor his Nan is dead.”(l.1)