Dave Egger’s short story Accident explains an accident occurred between the narrator of the story and the three teenagers in the car involved. The book contains a description of how the accident occurred. The story is therefore written in the perspective of the second person which is preferably vital since it captures the mindset of the reader and puts him/her in the mood of the character of the short story (Foucault, M. (2019). The story commences with the narrator driving his car(automobile) through an intersection and later causing an accident. The three teenagers who are hit by the narrator are beautiful. Still, the narrator, after noticing all the damage he has caused to the teenager’s vehicle, becomes too fearful of approaching them.
The story is written by Dave Eggers, who explains the scenario of an accident. The story takes place at a scene of an accident where the narrator (a middle-aged man) hits a moving car that has three teenagers in it. The entire story is about how he feared to approach teenagers (Foucault, M. (2019). The narrator is also very worried about how the three teenagers would react on the matter and what they could do to him later.
This short story is written majorly on the perspective of the narrator, who is termed as the causer of the accident. At the beginning of the story, the narrator was very nervous as he approached the teenagers. However, after having a dialogue with them and taking their contacts, he realized that they were not that bad (Bones, H. (2019). This was contrary to his thinking since he thought there were to harm him or sue him to court, but they were not.
The story describes the teenager’s adolescence and also the regret that is seen in the narrator about the happening in the scene of the accident according to the narrator’s viewpoint. The perspective of the short story gives an allowance for an easier unique experience in reading because it ushers the reader into the character’s position (Bones, H. (2019). Surprisingly the narrator’s physique and gender remain unmentioned except his/ her age which makes it easy for the readers to connect with him/her since there is not any requirement of appearance. The correct use of similes in the narrative gives a better and broad branching of emotions and also the ideals of the audience that are placed into the short story and makes them feel as if the event happened to them such as, the details seen by the narrator of the car that he hit, the thought process he had, the description of the teenagers given by the author of the book.
Eggers tries to convey to the audience of the emotions and also the reactions that are meant to be felt by the reader of the narrative. Eggers uses you (the narrator of the story) to put into the shoes of the causer of the accident with the three teenagers. The narrator perfectly deposits guilt and remorse into the one reading the narrative. The idea of the narrator admitting the blame and trying to convince the teenager persuasively brings the reader into the emotional mood.
Most commonly vehicle accident and collision are considered an awful and negative happening and his short story describe how Dave advises people who could find themselves in the same situation to handle the situation fearlessly and try to solve it well (Kiritchenko et al. 2016). The theme of this short story is that positive things can also be found in a bad situation and adverse events. Things might be in a bad state, but the end might be right than the faced journey. Our projects in life might cause an accident on the way, but the end is better.
References
Foucault, M. (2019). Structuralism and Literary Analysis. Critical Inquiry, 45(2), 531-544.
Bones, H. (2019). Accident or Desire? Linked Archives and the Trans-Tasman Literary Scene. Script & Print, 42(4), 197-211.
Kiritchenko, S., & Mohammad, S. (2016, May). Happy accident: A sentiment composition lexicon for opposing polarity phrases. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16) (pp. 1157-1164).