The short story Sea Story is written by A.S. Byatt in 2013. It is a story about the young Harold, who has a very significant relation to the nature especially to the sea. He falls in love with the beautiful woman Laura, but he does not reveal his love to her. Laura is leaving to study abroad and Harold is having a hard time without her, so he writes her a love letter in a bottle message, but the bottle does not get to the intended destination without being broken by the sea.
In this essay I will focus on the writer’s use of literary quotations, and which connection it has to the main character. Furthermore I will focus on the role of the nature in the short story and also a characterization of the main character.
The story …show more content…
It does not seem like Harold has been socializing a lot with people while he was younger because he can not say anything to Laura, because he is so much in love with her. He has not learned to define his feelings. He never really tells her how he feels, but instead He wrote her love letters in his mind (page 2, line 72), but the love letters in his mind are not very useful, when Laura does not know about them. Harold is very engaged to poetry and he will rather write Laura a poem than his own words defining his feeling.
A.S. Byatt uses literary quotations a couple of times in the short story. She is quoting the poet Masefield, whose poems often were about a fascination of the sea1, which you can compare with the fascination that Harold and his mother has for the sea. Furthermore A.S. Byatt is comparing Harold’s feelings and thoughts about Laura to Marvell’s thoughts about a woman, where Harold like Marvell feels that he could spend the rest of his life admiring his beloved2. In the end A.S. Byatt uses a well-known love poem by Robert Burns, in which nature also plays a big imagery part like it does in A.S. Byatt’s short story3. Robert Burns is in his poem comparing his love to a woman with the love he has to specific parts of the nature. A.S. Byatt uses the love poem by Robert Burns as the love poem which Harold writes to Laura while she is in the Caribbean. Harold writes Laura