Her finder du hjælp og inspiration til en analyse af novellen "The Sentry" af Téa Obreht. Udover analysehjælp giver vi dig et summary af teksten, samt inspiration til fortolkning og perspektivering.
Eksamensspørgsmål
Novellen var en del af den skriftlige eksamen i Engelsk A på HHX den 22. maj 2014, hvor opgaveformuleringen lød:
Write an analytical essay in which you analyse and interpret the short story “The Sentry" by Téa Obreht. Part of your essay must focus on characterization and relationships.
Præsentation af teksten
Titel: ”The Sentry” (2010)
Forfatter: Téa Obreht
Genre: Novelle
Teá Obreht (1985- ) er en amerikansk forfatter med serbiske rødder. Hun er født i Beograd i Serbien, men kom til USA med sin mor i 1997. Hun vandt Orange Prize for Fiction for sin debutromen The Tiger's Wife i 2011.
Denne novelle blev udgivet i den britiske avis The Guardian, som en del af en serie kaldet ”Summer Fiction Special series”.
Uddrag
Nedenfor kan du se et kort uddrag fra vores study guide til teksten:
Title
The title of the story, “The Sentry” hints at the war setting as we find out the main character’s father “came back from the front” (l. 2) where he “was assigned a sentry mastiff called Kaiser” (l. 1). The title refers to both the dog which was trained to be aggressive and the father, who illustrates the consequences of war.
Given the characters’ names – Bojan, Mrs Senka – and the writer’s Serbian background, we can assume the events take place during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. Several other hints suggest that the father was a sentry at a prisoners’ camp: “This was years before newspaper reports surfaced, years before photographs of barbed-wire compounds and starved men herded into lines.” (ll. 44-46)