Sophia remembers all the past incidents while she is soaping her soar Free Essay Example

Sophia remembers all the past incidents while she is soaping her soar arm. Both Iris and Sophia sing together the songs of Grocer Jack. Since, Jack has not been producing any song after this one far about twenty years. So Sophia and Iris start to sing Elvis song which was written in German language. Their father has translated the songs into English for them. In school both of them translate the songs into English with the help of dictionaries. Sophia, watches a mysterious happening of a small crowd of people in front of her home watching Iris on the pavement.

Her father stands at the square of the front gate that has been closed. Both his hands are on its top bar. Her mother is at the front door, half looking from the door frame. Enraged with Iris behaviour her father sends her out of the house. Since Sophia supports Iris, Sophia will also be sent out. His father throws out the suitcase which contains their dress and other things.

They do not find any living place and they often the suitcase only at the pavement. Iris leaves her home.

Smith again brings back the present through Sophia as it is the morning of Christmas day. She is at the edge of the bed, looking at the cradled head. The head is like a stone without face and hair. It appears smooth all over, like a polished marble stone. But she feels for it. Sophia admits that, she does not want it to grow cold.

She picks it up again, tucks under clothes on the skin of her abdomen and holds it against her. The child appears like a round piece of stone in a size of a small head lays there, does nothing. There the stone (the head of the child) has done nothing which is very intimate to Sophia. ‘How could something be this uncomplicated? How could it be at the same time, so mysterious? Look. It was nothing but a stone. What a relief. It was the notion of relief aspired to and had always been meant to mean’ (142).

Smith records some of the incidents happened in September 1981, a woman was making protest in front of the main gate of the British military office gate. Among the crowd, one of them phoned to the ministry of defence. An official at the MOD told the reporter that some women had chained themselves. Military people came and went and some people took photographs. The voice of Sophia said, ‘Without his contemptuous dismissal, we wouldn’t have stayed, one of the protestors says years later. I had five kids to get back to’ (147).

The crowd began with thirty six women, several children and a straggle of supporters of both men and women walking one hundred and twenty miles in ten days. The people chained themselves again and slept near the fence. The novel then shifts to Art waking up from the nightmare. In the sleeper nightmare he was being chased by giant monstrous flowers. The appearance of the petals are like jaws, teeth, erect and quivering. He runs inside an old church and closes the door. He addresses the flower monsters through his mouth, he can himself no longer open, he is stony. With the inspiration from a TV show, when in hypotnist teaches the people how to maintain quietness without being disturbed by external pressures, Art has been pressing his palms to keep his mind cool. Since he has been feared-stricken and in a state of confusion, he is doing the experiment of pressing his hands. In a moment of short temper and uneasiness, he shouts as follows, ‘Stop bullying me. I am political. It’s pathetic. Look at you, all mouth and stamen. Look at me, stiff as stone. What would Freud say about this dream?’ (152).

He utters literally saying the last of these sentences out loud when he opens his eyes in the dark. He wakes up. He is in Chei Bres and his mother’s huge house is situated in Cornwall. Since Art wants to earn extra money lead his life better he works in a firm named SA4A Entertainment. Fearing that he will be trapped by his company suspecting on him that he has revealed the copyright to someother companies, he could not sleep in the night. But lying in his bed, he remembers his grandfather’s funeral. When Iris arrives he does not recognize her. However, at the reception, Iris accompanies everyone with stories and songs about her father and Art. Art is very much interested in writing stories and songs whereas his father has forced him not to write either stories or songs. But Art ignores his father’s words and continue to write them. When he asks about his mother whether he has known her as a child, she replies negatively and dismisses her sister as a hopeless mythologized one. ‘He was too angry with her. She did not even turn up to your grandmother’s, my mother’s funeral. Your aunt, my sister, Arthur is a hopeless mythologizer’ (173).

The narrator then shifts to another Christmas in 1991, which Art has no memory of it. He is five years old and loving near a place called Newlina. They are all playing with his gift, a Game boy. When ‘ the lady who is his mother parks'(175) a really big car like a jeep at the front door and comes into the house. Art’s mother tells him to go to the boarding school. It is Christmas morning, Art shows Lux a video of his father, Godfrey Gable. He has been famous for playing a flamboyant(a type of game) man on Television and in pantomimes. He tells that if he would have had his laptop, he could show the ‘you tube’, there is an old film on him. They would watch on their mothers computer.

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