Land of the Lost
Stewart O’Nan
Everybody has tried to be lost, either in a physical place or in their own life and mind. This theme is the short story ‘’ Land of the Lost’’ about. Here experiences the reader the development of a woman, who gets more and more obsessed with a case about a missing girl. The short story never explains to the reader, if the woman finds the girl, and why she is so obsessed, which I will try to find out. I will analyse the main character, her obsession, the title and therefor will I analyse the ending of the story with the information, I discover.
The events of the short story are being told as a 3rd limited person narrator, because we only see the events from ...view middle of the document...
She begins with talking about this case, with a girl who is missing, with the costumers. Actually, she talks so much about it, that the manager tells her to stop, which we already here can conclude that the case is beginning to become an obsession for her. The murder James Wade then tells the media that he has buried the girl somewhere west of Kingsville, which we must assume is nearby to the main character, because she looks after the girl up to four times a week, while she still has the job as cashier.
She starts in the small and take shovel, a spade etc. with her, when she search, but then it begins to escalated, with her buying new stuff and make one of the boys room to a ‘’commandocenter’’ . She therefor gets more and more serious, and she also calls a searching website her bible. She can’t understand, why her sons see it as a problem. She admits to herself that she actually is doing it because: ‘’ .. And looking gave her a sense of accomplishment’’ , because the only person who actually needs her, is her dog Ollie. So now she has something to do with her life, and she actually feel that people need her, and therefor she has a place in the world. It is also the reason, why she is afraid that one day in the newspaper, they will declare that they found the missing girl. She has dedicated her whole life to find this girl, but she doesn’t do it alone. When she is searching, she says ‘’they’’ which is her and Ollie, which she takes to classes, so he can learn to identify bodies. She also changes her shifts at the BI-LO to the evening or night, so she has more daylight to look after the body, which is an another symbol, of how much she changes her life because of the searching.
To sum up the main character is a woman, who is deeply alone and gets obsessed with the case. She dedicates her...