Flowers - by Robin Jenkins

489 Words2 Pages
‘Flowers’ by Robin Jenkins is a short story about a young girl who has been evacuated to the Highlands during WW2 and dislikes it so much that she decides to break the rules. She rebels by going to the beach where the fighter jets practise bombing and finds a gruesome scene. This short story deals with a less pleasant side of life concerned with the consequences of war and the loneliness of the main character Margaret. In this essay I will show unpleasant life can be. Robin Jenkins first shows you how different the little girl is, “red eyed dissenter”. This shows that the little girl could be angry or has maybe been crying. I think Jenkins has used ‘dissenter’ to identify Margaret as different from everyone else suggesting her loneliness and isolation from the others. Loneliness is a theme throughout ‘Flowers’ which shows that life can be very unpleasant especially if you are alone. The theme of loneliness continues when, after Miss Laing tells the children to go pick flowers they all “scamper off” but the little girl doesn’t. Instead she goes and stands under the “shadow of a tall pine”. The word ‘scamper’ is used to slow that the children don’t have a care in the world, whereas I think that Margaret does. The ‘shadow of the tall pine’ is used to develop the intensity of her loneliness by showing that she is overwhelmed in darkness. Here the use of imagery makes the theme of loneliness even more unpleasant. Her loneliness is further developed when she sees a boy talking Gaelic and she doesn’t understand it “mysterious and hateful to her Lowland ears”. This suggests that her loneliness is building into anger and frustration. The words ‘mysterious’ and ‘hateful’ shows that her loneliness has made her feel angry inside. This is when the theme begins to be least pleasant, when you get so lonely that you become dark and angry which makes things a
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