論我條命

痛痛快快的揚下的千字，但願不會叫我死得太難看。

這幾日真的忙得不知時日過；怎都好，現在終於終於，可以安心的呼一口氣。

還有，本人最近腦子裡有個故事，整理須時，但大綱和第一章總算寫好了的；有興趣幫我一把的朋友們，請聯絡我吧。

作家夢可成真的嗎？

Behind the Scenes at the Museum – Kate Atkinson

Question: How does the author, Kate Atkinson, of Behind the Scenes at the Museum convey the cruel reality of life through the main protagonist, Ruby Lennox?

I will demonstrate how in the novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson, the author conveys the cruel reality of life through the main protagonist, Ruby Lennox. I will show how the author does this through skilful use of characterisation, key incidents and tone.

No one has a perfect life. Everyone has conflicts that they must face sooner or later, and the way that people deal with their own problems can cause them to change as people. For many reasons, it may be that people grow as they experience life; they change their views. As the main protagonist in Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Ruby Lennox, the youngest girl among four of Berenice’s daughters, also has a few, but quite big, changes in her life; for example, the way that she faces her mother and sisters after she experiences the deaths of a number of her sisters, her pets, and last, but not least, her father. When Ruby is small, her relationship with her mother is not that close, as her mother conceived her grudgingly. At first it does not seem to matter so much to Ruby that she does not receive enough attention, as she does not have the concept of love. However, when she grows up, Ruby gradually realises that she lacks attention and love from her mother. Sometimes Ruby seems to be upset and bewildered, thinking that she hardly really exists in the world due to the fact her mother did not even want her, and then does not offer her much love. She really wants to leave home on several occasions, but because Berenice is the only mother she has, she cannot.

This novel is narrated by the main protagonist. She tells about her own life and her family from when she is still in her mother’s womb to her middle age when her mother dies, and through the key events that happen and the people around her, she changes and the cruel reality of life is revealed.

The author describes that the conception of Ruby by Bunty is what she doesn’t expect and doesn’t want. The day after Ruby is conceived, Bunty visits her grandmother, Nell. During that visit, Bunty encounters a fly and she kills it with a swat. After that, Ruby tells us:

‘A second ago that fly was alive and well, now it’s dead. Yesterday I didn’t exist, now I do. Isn’t life amazing?’

Ruby compares the death of the fly ironically to her existence, which implies that actually she thinks that Bunty feels hideous about her conception, as if it is an annoying fly. This to me, also reflects that her mother feels dissatisfied with her life. According to Ruby’s narration and the footnotes after each chapter, Bunty and her mother, Nell, do not marry a man they really love. They just treat their husbands, George and Frank, as substitutes for their actual lovers.

George and Bunty always have arguments and mistrust each other. George is a flirty man who has affairs with his children’s babysitter, Auntie Doreen, while Bunty always wishes her children were elsewhere and she could go away to somewhere wonderful with her dream lover.

Bunty also experiences the death of her daughter, Gillian, who dies in a traffic accident during Christmas. After Gillian dies, Bunty starts to be neurotic to all the things that the rest of her daughters do, as she is afraid that her daughters will be harmed again.

‘ ‘Can I go upstairs?’ I ask.
‘No, not on your own,’ She says, staring in an abstracted way at the Bob Martin display. This is so illogical it’s not even worth combating – I am nine years old, I have been going upstairs on my own since I could walk. Since Gillian’s death Bunty has been extra-sensitive to the dangers surrounding us – it’s not only fire that we’re under threat from, we are continually reassured of her maternal care for us by the steam of warnings that issue from her mouth – Be careful with that knife! You’ll poke your eye out with that pencil! Hold onto the banister! Watch that umbrella! so that the world appears to be populated by objects intent on attacking us.’

From this long quotation, we can see how Bunty acts against Ruby and Ruby has a lot of grievance against her. Under Bunty’s strict rule, Ruby and Patricia feel that Bunty is harsh as rock and icy which makes them gradually wonder whether Bunty loves them or not.

The adolescence of Patricia is the most irritating period of her life. She is a sensible teenager and cannot bear her family’s detached treatment and has a lot of arguments with her parents. In Chapter 9 Holiday!, I can clearly see how Patricia acts against her mother:

‘When are we going to eat?’ I ask plaintively.
‘Eat?’ Bunty asks in disbelief.
‘Yes, eat,’ Patricia says sarcastically. ‘You know – eat, food, ever heard if it?’

Eventually, she leaves home. After Patricia leaves, this makes a quite big impact on Ruby because she loses the last relative to whom she can express herself.

Ruby has to face this fact and within a family where she experiences little love, she loses her identity in the family, as the quotation shows that she asks herself:

‘I’m fourteen and already I’ve ‘had enough’. Bunty was nearly twice my age before she started saying that. I’m an only child now with all the advantages (money, clothes, records) and all the disadvantages (loneliness, isolation, anguish). I’m all they’ve got left, a ruby solitaire, a kind of chemical reduction off all their children.’

The thought of Ruby shows that how she turns into a solitary girl and she starts to care less about the people who come and go around her, as she lives in her own world.

Here, I see how the manipulation of different characters by the author affects Ruby, and the changes in her own character, which are also shaped by the circumstances of her life, especially the death of Gillian and the disappearance of Patricia.

I can also clearly see how Ruby changes through the tone of the first person narrative employed by the author as she narrates the story. In Chapter Seven Fire! Fire!, a fire at midnight which burns down Ruby’s home and her parents’ pet shop, and it kills most of the pets in the shop. Ruby says:

‘Many things are uncertain but there is one thing we can feel sure about – this morning, the arms of Jesus are very full indeed.’

Ruby uses a sort of black humour to describe the pets that have died in the fire, in term of the comforting things Sunday School teaches and parents could tell children at this time. She gives me the impression that death and disappearance of somebody or something are not so important and sad from Ruby’s point of view; as she has become so detached and numbed by these experiences and loss that she is able to refer to such tragedies in a humorous tone.

However, after Ruby experiences her grandmother, Nell’s, and her dad, George’s, deaths. She begins to change her mind and starts to be worried. She realises that some day her only relative, Bunty, will leave too. In Chapter Ten Wedding Bell, Ruby witnesses George dying of a heart attack during a wedding party and Bunty trying to rescue him. She says,

‘It’s strange to watch her trying to give him the kiss of life – while he was alive I never saw her kissing him and yet here she is, now he’s dead, kissing him with all the passion of a new bride.’

I can see how through this method of narration the author reveals Ruby’s mind, that she is concerned about experiencing the same thing as Bunty has experienced some day. She feels confused that she still cannot figure out whether the people around her are important or not and does not know how to face them.

The life of Ruby seems either just too tedious and insignificant, or things are just not going her way. The way Ruby copes with things with a detached, ironical attitude is sad to me, but this is the only way for her to overcome one more day of her boring life, which is full of bitterness, confusion, depression, false hopes, and the feeling of love which Ruby is trying to express to her mother when she grows up. However, it is too late as Bunty is on the verge of dying. In this way I see how Ruby’s life is linked by a series of cruel realities. However, at the end Ruby manages how to cope with her life and finds herself, as she says:

‘I am alive. I am a precious jewel. I am a drop of blood. I am Ruby Lennox.’