A Gap Of Sky By Anna Hope

A Gap of Sky is a short story by Anna Hope which deals with the pressure from society and the consequences of it. In our modern society many young people feel the pressure to be perfect like a heavy weight on their shoulders. You need a long, good education. You need to be attractive, be social and have lots of friends. Sometimes the pressure can become too much and you forget what is important in life and gets on the wrong track.

In A Gap of Sky we meet Ellie a nineteen year old girl clearly struggling with the pressure from society and her own dreams. She seems in conflict with herself about what she really wants. She studies at a university in London but is close to getting expelled due to her lack of activity and finished assignments and when she wakes up after a long night of partying, she remembers that she has an assignment about Virginia Woolf and if she does not hand it in, she will very likely be expelled.

It easily feels like Ellie are the narrator also because of the language used. There is a lot of swearing “How the fuck did she manages to sleep for so long” (page 1, line 16), “coffee plunged, poured, slurped; hot, fuck that’s hot” (page 1, line 35).

The narrator is not just telling what is happening but how Ellie perceives it. Ellie are having troubles in her life. She is doing drugs, having a hard time performing well in school, and that she does not have a profound social relationship. And it seems she has a difficult relationship with her parents. I will later discuss her relationship with her parents further. In text 4 “Consequences of youth substance abuse” It mentions that people who frequently use addictive substances often experience problems such as academic difficulties, health problems and low social life. This is all things that Ellie are affected by.