Essay - A Gap of Sky

Everyone knows the feeling of realizing when we take things for granted. It does not matter whether it is persons, pleasures or love because it hurts a bit inside anyway. You wonder if it is too late to make it up, but it should never be too late. Ellie becomes aware of her problem and at last, she knows that she has done a good thing and the right thing to do as well.
Ellie is a wild teenager who wants to live life a little extreme. By the word extreme is meant that she party much, does not care much for school and she uses coke. Ellie develops throughout the story from being a nineteen-year-old drug abuser, who wanders around in her own small world in which it is all about drugs and she does not see the world or the people around her. In the store, she focuses her thoughts on the stone and her mother. She realizes that she has taken love and life for granted and how ungrateful and foolish that is. It is the point of no return, Ellie wakes up and start thinking about life and it values. She opens her eyes to the world she is living in. She becomes aware of the people, their love and the bonds of love between everyone. The feeling of being alive gives Ellie an ecstasy, which clearly is better than the intoxication of drugs. Her name means shining light or beautiful woman and it seems suitable because of her improvement.
Ellie walks around London city as she goes for printer ink and the other errands. She does not tell us much about where she is going. Ellie just keep on walking as she appears on the streets more or less suddenly and this may interpret the confusion in her mind. She wants to go to the river, but does not get there at first, but then, after having her wakeup call, she ends by the river. It means that even though she did not know what she wanted at first and that she had not made up her mind about her future, she finally gets there and she knows what to do. The city setting and her development is parallel.
Throughout the story, the development of Ellie is shown through the language, which is, at first, composed of many short sentences, swearwords and it seems dirty and confusing. Later on, as Ellie becomes more aware of the world around her, the language is more civilized, it consists of longer sentences and the cursing is left out. The language is characterized of Ellie’s thoughts. No other persons and no direct speech appear in the text, but her thoughts make the language more alive and because of the limited point of view, which is, despite of the third person narrator, dominated by Ellie and her thoughts, the language is from time to time informal. This occurs in the form of words like “fuck”, “booze”, “fags”, “sixish”, and “bloody”. The last-mentioned is also very characteristic of the British colloquial language whereas Ellie’s use of “Fuck”, “OK. OK” and “Jesus” seem to be narrative comments. As the dividing line between the third person narrator and Ellie is very indistinct, the combination of showing and telling technique is clear. The setup of the story is chronologically with flashbacks. As it is written in present tense, neither Ellie nor we know what happens next. Altogether, it is written in a language suited to the subject. This makes the story more exiting and as it probably takes place today it is easier to identify oneself with Ellie.
The themes focused on here are drugs, love, growing up, identity and taking life or love for granted. Love gives you delight and pleases you in many way while it is persistent whereas drugs only gives you a temporarily pleasure in the shape of intoxication. Ellie grows: from being a girl who only wants to enjoy the moment to a confident girl who wants to enjoy not only the moments but also life.
The message of the story can be that everybody can change and improve and be a better version of them. Ellie is a great example of that. It can be that there will always be a second chance or in other words, there is always light for the end of the tunnel as well.
The title appears in the middle of the story. “She turns left, onto Shaftesbury Avenue, and as she turns there is a gap of sky to her right, an emptiness, a vacancy that she doesn’t remember seeing before, something destroyed, or being built” (p. 4, ll. 91-93) Suddenly Ellie realizes what she wants. She is aware that this is a possibility to change. She wakes up and she understands the aspects of life. Many people need a gap of sky like the one Ellie obtains and preferably more than once in a lifetime. It does not have to be an exclusive one each time, but small revelations give you a chance to change in a better direction.