critical commentary IV HARRY NIGHTINGALE
This story exhibits a seven-year-old boy who witnesses a cataclysmic event: the sky erupts in front of his eyes, inverting convention and morphing ‘heaven’ into ‘hell’. Thematically, I focused on surrealism, leitmotif and inversions of normality – for example the narration is from a child’s mind, yet is almost poetic in its abstract thought processes. These are linked to my stimuli, namely Haruki Murakami’s ‘The Kangaroo Communiqué’ and Graham Greene’s ‘The End of the Party’ and ‘I Spy’ – all of which explore underlying, suppressed insanity and, with respect to Greene specifically, the use of a child protagonist, which is integral to the flow of my story. In ‘The End of the Party’ particularly, the naive nature of the story is contrasted by the style of writing and concepts portrayed: the writing seems quite Dickensian, which could be viewed as contrived considering when it was written (1929). To relate this back to my own piece, I strived to widen this contrast further in creating a typical 1970s English home, through distinct and discrete synecdoches like “red jam tart”, within the rich imagination of the child which streams unhindered; he is free to paint his own picture of the world around him. The title alone, ‘91 Deceitful Ginger Cakes’, generates a surreal image in the mind of the reader, personifying the cakes which themselves are present throughout the story as a leitmotif. The title is a conglomeration of these motivic objects: the number 91 holds great strength in the boy’s hallucinations, the idea of deceit is integral to the story (that the boy, and the world, has been lied to and in fact heaven is hell) and the ginger cakes are in a sense an objective correlative for the boy’s illness – and that illness itself could be seen as a catalyst for the visions, giving the ginger cakes great importance in the story. The structure of the
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