”Mount Pleasant”
By Mary-Louise Buxton
In this short story called “Mount Pleasant”, you see the world through a child’s eyes because the short story is written with a unique narrative technique and language. The reader’s mind is brought back to the time where ghosts and other wicked and impressive creatures filled the darkest corners of the thoughts from one’s young days. This curiously written short story is the product of Mary-Louise Buxton, written in 2005, and it is about Elizabeth and her imaginative everyday life.
“Mount-Pleasant” is about a young girl, whose name is Elizabeth, and she narrates the reader through her daily life. The story is written with an explicit first-person narrator, and it seems like reading a diary.
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One night he lifts Elizabeth and her sister to their bedroom, but their dog is in their way. He attempts to make a move by swiping a newspaper at it and male it run away in fear. He says “Move dog” (Page 4, line 133), and is seems like he and the rest of the family does not owe much respect and love for their animal.
While proceeding though the story you as the reader keep expecting that something bad will happen to this family and especially to Elizabeth. You get relived when you realize that nothing happens to them and that you have feared in vain. But then the question is, if things is really fine and in order? Because in the end of the short story the mother picks up the photo of the man which Elizabeth had found earlier and she puts it back on top of the mantelpiece. Elizabeth believes that it must have dropped down during the night. However, as she says on page 5 line 164: “I run to the mantelpiece and put the picture in the grate”, because she had put it down herself before she went to bed. Here you have to notice that the father says “Maybe he lived here before we did? We’ll put him on the mantelpiece, shall we, with our photos. He can be one of the family”, when Elizabeth showed him the picture. After the father declares the man on the picture a member of the family, the picture is not on the mantelpiece. This could be the reason why there was all that fuss over the night. Elizabeth’s silhouette in the dark could be the ghost of the man on the picture.
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