Analysis of ”a Gap of Sky” by Anna Hope

Analysis of ”A Gap of Sky” by Anna Hope

In life you have to overcome many challenges. These challenges often take place in the youth where you experience a transition from childhood to adulthood and where you begin finding your place in society. This transition is often difficult as it is often hard to choose the right path to follow. More and more young people get caught up in drugs and feel a pressure from the society that keeps them from choosing the path that fits them the best.

The short story “A Gap of Sky” is written by the English author Anna Hope and published in 2008. The short story is about a girl named Ellie. She is nineteen years old and lives in London, England. Ellie lives without her parents and goes to University College London.

The narration in A Gap of Sky is actually quite unique. It is a third person narrator who tells the story, but the narrator is aware of Ellie, her feelings and thoughts, and describes them detailed. We never hear the narrator saying ‘I’, because the narrator does not exist. The narrator is like a fly on the wall, all-knowing. We empathize with Ellie because we can put ourselves in her position and thoughts because of the narrator.

We do not get a description of Ellie but just hear about her from her flashbacks to the night before and we get to make up our own opinion about Ellie without hearing about her from other characters in the story.

Ellie is an independent girl, but you as a reader get the feeling that she is not taking good care of herself. She does drugs and cannot remember to do her assignments and hand them in in time to her professors. We get introduced to her in the beginning just as she wakes up at 4 pm. after a rough night having taken various drugs and alcohol. She remembers her assignment due to the next day, discarding it to the lower bottom of her priority list. This gives us the impression of a shallow person not willing to take on her responsibilities. After some thinking, she finally decides to take on the assignment, but her printer is out of ink. This forces her to leave her apartment.

In London, the first pinpoint of her character is given to us when she encounters a black glove impaled on a spike, middle finger pointing up in the air. This gives her a strange feeling, quote; “A volt of naughtiness passes through her. Life seems, suddenly, filled with possibility”. The gesture of the glove makes Ellie feel alive, and in my opinion, defines her current personality very well. The fact the gloves makes her giggle, gives her a childish character not realizing the unsustainable position she is in.

“She is only nineteen”

Her age is also mentioned often as to underline the importance of her youth and possible lack in maturity.

 She also blames her current position on her parents, saying; “It was their fault she was doing this bloody course in the first place”. Again, she is unwilling to take responsibility.

This and other facts like her cursing, doing drugs, going out on Sundays and her messy room all gives us the impression that this is a stressed girl, who is definitely not at peace, she is in conflict with herself.

The reason why we know she is in conflict with herself is revealed in the first sentence in the short story: ‘It is dark, but the wrong dark.’ Ellie likes the dark, but she senses that it is the wrong kind of dark. The wrong dark refers not only to, that it is probably dark in her room because her curtains are closed and it is daylight outside, but to her state of mind and that Ellie is aware of that there is something wrong in her life. But she, at this point, is not aware of what is wrong. But she can sense that something is.

At the afternoon she realizes she has forgotten to write her essay on Virginia Woolf which is due Tuesday.

Ellie starts to panic as she remembers she does not have any printer ink and as a result of this she cannot print her essay. Ellie’s mission when she gets out of bed is to hunt down ink as fast as possible.

Ellie goes through the different streets of London in the searching for ink.  

At that point she has given up on her life, willing to do almost anything because “what the heck”. She keeps mentioning she is “free”, but this is disproved because she doesn’t care about anything anymore, and that makes her empty and lost.