Lonely Case

Everything comes to an end. Every life has a beginning and with a beginning always follows an end. Perhaps to make it balance? This short story circles around difficult aspects of life: death, life, illness and religion. Colm Tóibín brings subjects up for discussion, who are hard to be confronted with in our everyday life but we know that one-day death will catch up with us all. Life is like a long lasting journey. We are always moving from one point to another but we are never able to fully take the control of our journey. It decides where to take us.

The short story "A Journey" takes place in a car and in the end the setting moves into their house. Mary, the main character is returning her twenty-year-old son home from seven months in hospital to a dying father. David suffers from depression and Seamus; Mary's husband has a heart condition.

The composition of the story is interesting because there are a lot of flashbacks so the events don't appear in a chorological order. The story begins with a flashback where Mary speculates how she could give birth to a child after so many years when they actually had given up the hope of having a child but sometimes in life things happens with no reason and it's not always what you expect. The story doesn't have an introduction. It starts in medias res and that caches the reader's attention because the story grabs you in the very first beginning. The flash backs are also central for the story because through them we get to know Mary as a person. A third person narrator tells the story and because of that we only hear Mary's opinions and thoughts. It makes the story a bit unreliable when it's a subjective narrator. If the story was told from David's or Seamus's point of view it would probably had given us a different impression because it would have been their thoughts and how things looks for them.

Mary is lonely. She isn't in contact with anybody except with her neighbour, Mrs Redmond who used to babysit David when he was a child and curious about everything like any other child at that age. Mary is also caring and tries to reach out for David with coming on with some funny comments but David rejects her. She's also has self-irony: "I must be getting old. " On her way to pick him up from the hospital, she had to drive slowly even if she knew the road