to question the information being supplied to them. The first change of pronouns is during a memory lapse when the lecturer is speaking, as “he took her scarf and jacket, she was always one for manners, I remembered that”. I thought this was the ideal place to introduce the first switch of pronouns, as it is a moment when the lecturer recalls the woman, remembering a specific detail about her, and the relationship he had with her. In addition to this, the removal of the scarf and jacket can be seen as a symbol of sexuality (through the removal of clothing) and vulnerability. As the story progresses, further pronounal changes become apparent. The lecturer, when giving the slideshow oscillates between “he” and “I”, the shifts marking the character’s transition from self-control to the rise of the dark passenger. In ‘Second Best’, shifts in pronouns describing the mole alter how we view its significance. Referring to the mole as “it” depersonalises it and diminishes our sense of attachment. Once the pronoun changes to “him”, the creature takes on a masculine identity,with its connotations of strength. ‘The Reader Wants Drama, Please’ climaxes after these shifts with the collapse of narrator and dark passenger as they step out of the car together, engulfed in darkness. The intellectual context in which modernists wrote was characterised by Freud. Freud separated the mind into the Id, Ego and Superego. The Id, being the most primal part of the mind, is the area where our most basic desires dwell: the need for sexual gratification, and the need to kill and assert one’s dominance. I wanted to show in my story that all people have the capacity for violence. Readers delight in violent stories, and many readers of this story will follow the non-specific resolution with their own imagined endings, most of which will be violent: “the reader wants drama, please”. Morality, like all other socially authorised and authored narratives, is a contrived fiction and not a set of absolute values. The
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