Denne study guide giver hjælp til analyse af novellen “The North London Book of the Dead” (1991) af Will Self. Novellen kan du læse i tekstbogen Now & Zen (s. 113). Sammen med en analyse af novellen får du også et summary og hjælp til temaer og perspektivering.
Will Self (f. 1961) er en britisk forfatter, journalist og tv-personlighed, som har vundet adskillige litterære priser. Blandt andet for novellesamlingen The Quantity Theory of Insanity, hvorfra “The North London Book of the Dead” er taget. Will Self ynder at udforske teamer som vanvid, stoffer og psykisk sygdom.
Uddrag
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Humor and irony
The narrator describes the situation he is in with humor and irony. Plenty of descriptions provoke amusement and laughter, like the description of the undertaker “conspicuously scratching his grey bottom” (p. 115, ll. 35-35).
The narrator then claims that his mother “was observing the world with a familiar ‘there will be tears before bedtime’ sort of expression” (p. 118, ll. 30-31), a description which provokes amusement, but also hints at her difficult personality. When the narrator talks about his mother’s prejudices, he uses humorous expressions to describe the people she disliked, like “shat chocolate ice cream” (p. 118, l. 4).
When he talks about his mother’s attitude towards death, the narrator is ironic: “… she’d always been so empathic about what happened to people after they die: ‘They rot, that’s it. You put’em in a box and they rot. All that religious stuff, it’s a load of crap’” (p. 120, ll. 33-36). Irony is also used at the end, when the narrator claims he would “never live down the ignominy of having a mother who phoned me at the office” (p. 128, ll. 38-39).
