Close to the Water's Edge. Essay

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Close to the Water’s Edge.

Close to the Water’s Edge is a short story written by the Irish writer Claire Keegan.
The main character in the story is a boy who just turned 19. He is a student at the Harvard University or as he call it himself Cambridge, which is the town where Harvard University is situated. Through out the story he is staying at his mother’s penthouse apartment near the ocean.
His birthday party is marked by a dinner at the fancy restaurant Leonardo’s. But the atmosphere at the dinner is cold and cynical. The conversations between the main character, his mother and his millionaire stepfather is not comfortable and cheerfully but more snide and spiteful.
The millionaire stepfather is trying several times to discuss …show more content…
And in the way he is taunting the main character by giving him a pink cake as a joke, the stepfather think it is funny because the main character is gay. “It is a pink cake, the pinkest cake the young man has ever seen, like a cake you’d have at a christening party for twin girls. The millionaire is grinning.” (p.3, l.135-137)
The Grandmother tells the drearily story about a wasted life. Through flashbacks the story about how her biggest wish was leaving the Tennessean pig farm where she was living with her husband, and run away to go to the Atlantic. One day her husband finally agrees in fulfilling her dream. When they arrive at the Ocean he tell her that she got one hour and if she is not back by then he will leave her. At five minutes past the appointed hour, he slammed the car door and turned the ignition on. But the grandmother jumped into the road and stopped him, and afterwards she climbed into the car.
She later told her grandson, the main character, that if she had her life to live again, she would never have climbed back into that car.
Her life is the symbol of the wasted life, where other people chose the decisions for her and chose the roads she had to go.
The story is told by a limited omniscient 3. person narrator. This
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