Analysis and interpretation of “Poetic Justice” - 12

by The British short story “Poetic Justice” by Diana Appleyard concerns the choices we make in life and how these will affect us later on. At the same time, it is a story about dreams, disillusion, and facing reality.Throughout most of the story, a 3rd person narrator is used; it is seen from the narrator’s point of view with an internal focalization. However, this changes in the last two or three sentences, where,suddenly, a 1st person narrator is introduced. The actual setting of the story is the narrator’s house, most of the story actually takes place in cyberspace or in the narrator’s mind, when she is remembering past events.
The story evolves around two characters; the unnamed female narrator and the long lost love of her youth, Jed Cunningham. They’re both middle aged and British, but that is about the only similarities between them. She is living in a suburban neighbourhood somewhere in the UK with her husband, two children and a dog called Bramble - the typical cliché of a post-modern housewife. Her everyday consists of doing daily chores, writing articles for some sort of magazine or newspaper and collecting her youngest daughter from school. Jed Cunningham, on the other hand, is living alone in some remote place by the sea. This is the only real information we get about the recent Jim, as it is the only fact the narrator, and therefore we, knows. On the contrary, the adolescent Jim is profoundly described by the narrator; he was the coolest of the cool, the trendsetter, the worldly-wise, well read cynic who wanted to travel and be a poet - and best of all, he was her boyfriend. Even though her description of him is quite romanticised, is gives us a somewhat clear picture of Jim’s personality: He is the idealist, who never wants to do the expected or never is going to settle for anything but the