Imagine a world without dreams; would it not be empty and meaningless? This is the big question for many people. No one can live without dreams; you have to strive for something in life otherwise your life is boring and uneventful. If your dream never succeeds, you often isolate yourself. It is like living in a box, an empty box, where everything is the same. William, the main character in “Elephant”, deals with this problem every day. Polly Clark’s short story Elephant starts in media res, we just jump straight into the story without further information.
The story takes place in a dark office in the main character, William’s house and it is set in a normal afternoon in William’s life. The curtains are closed, so William cannot watch his garden, which is overcrowded and boring. The garden reminds him off the things he has not done. He is isolated in his office and does not go anywhere. The story is told by a 3rd person narrator, but the narrator tells a lot of things through William’s thoughts and therefore it is easy to identify yourself with William. The narrator tells the story in a way that makes you feel sorry for William, because of his problems.
William is a writer, who writes biographies about pop-singers, but he has had some problem in writing lately: “This inability to write a word had gone on for weeks” (p. 2 line 3-4). William is not happy about just writing about pop-singers. He dreams about writing biographies of actors in their golden age, because this is something people would buy and read, but those biographies have been claimed by someone, who was quicker than William and that is, why William is writing short biographies with information he has found on the internet: “… rom the facts William could glean from the internet. ”(p. 1 line 21). He uses the biographies as an excuse for not striving for his dream of becoming a big writer, who writes about the things he wants. William is not pleased about just writing about pop-singers, who most of the time just are one-hit-wonders and that is, why William writes about them. He can identify himself with them, because they also have a bad life without any progress after they have had their hits on the charts.
The pop-singers have the youth, which William never had: “The picture depressed him and he was not sure why….. His lost youth?… his own youth seemed entirely disconnected from this writing overmuscled variety. ”(p. 3 line 43-45). He does not remember much about his own youth, but he does remember one incident when he was six or seven years old. William was waiting for his mother to come home with a present: “It was twenty minutes filled with almost unbearable anticipation…. And then.. squeal of excitement, her arms around him and something placed on his lap, a wrapped object big enough to fill his entire embrace. Inside the bag – a blue elephant”(p. 3 line 60-64). This incident is the only thing he can remember from his childhood. If the only thing you can remember from your childhood is a blue elephant, which you have been given by your mother, then you do not have had a good childhood. Most children try to forget things, if it is something they do not like. They imagine that it does not exist and they just forget it to feel better again.
This could very much look like a situation, William has been involved in. He sees the pop-singers as the youth he does not has had. The title Elephant represents William’s lost childhood, because the only good thing he can look back at is his blue elephant. William has a wife named Ginny. Ginny works in an office and has a dream about moving to Australia with William. But William does not want to move; he is afraid off moving forward in his life. He is stocked in his own box. He is miserable inside; he just does not show it to Ginny.
It is like in the song “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”. The singer seems to be fine at the outside, but inside his miserable; he is too nice to other people, who do not care about him and he smiles at people he hates. He had done all this hard work, just to look good at the outside. In the end of the story William takes the first step in the right direction towards progress in his life. He starts to write what he wants. He does not want to write the same as always and therefore he is writing fictive endings of the pop singers biographies.
This is the same thing the narrator in “Introduction to the 1999 edition of The Pillars of the Earth” does. He writes something out of his league. He wants to try something new and unfamiliar and therefore he writes “The Pillars of the Earth” in a different way than he was used to. At last William gives Christine, who is his favourite pop singer, the story of his life. He wants to tell the story of his own life and therefore he writes an autobiography in which he replaces his own name with Christine’s.
He knows that he cannot write biographies anymore, but he does not care, because now he is over his depression and writes what he wants. William has finally made a try to fulfil his dream of becoming a great writer. B An ending of a story is often a very important thing for the reader. If it is a happy ending, then the reader is happy too and if it is a bad ending, then the reader feels sad. The best ending of a story, is the one where the ending is open and where the reader can interpret the ending by himself.
The reader thinks about the story and therefore the story has made a good impression on the reader and maybe the reader would like to read another book by the author. Open endings is also good because the reader in a way feels like a part of the story and the setting. For example the story Elephant has an open ending, because the reader can interpret the ending in many different ways. Some will call it bad ending, because William sits down and writes about his own life story so he would not be forgotten. Others will call it a good ending because William finally writes about the things he wants.
Fairytales always have good endings and that is because the target group is children and therefore the ending has to be good, because then the children become in a good mood after the story is told. For example all Disney’s fairytales have good endings. As to the bad endings, it is mostly horror stories, which have bad and scary endings. That is because the horror story is made to make the reader frightened. So if the story ends in a terrible and scary way, the reader automatically feels afraid or sad and that is the point of horror stories. An example of a horror story is Carrie, which is a classic horror story.
