Analysis of “People-Watching”

Hanging on to someone you have lost is common behaviour for human beings. This behaviour however can be divided into two categories; the healthy healing process where you keep memories of the person you have lost and the unhealthy kind, where you are not able to live your life, because you cannot move on from the death of your loved one. In the short story People Watching the main character, Paul, experiences the unhealthy kind of hanging on to dead people; he is stuck in the past. This I will analyse in the following essay, which will include a resume, a characterization of Paul and lastly it will deal with the story’s structure and the use of symbols, which all play an important role in the main theme.

“People-Watching” is a short story about the main character named Paul. Paul and Kajsa, one of the other students in one of Paul’s classes at the University College London, have received an assignment in the class Introduction to Drawing, where they have to become expert people-watchers. Therefore, they decide to sit at Paddington Station, where they are people-watching and drawing what they see. Kajsa is good at concentrating on her drawing and people-watching. Paul, on the other hand, finds it hard to draw the people he sees, because his thoughts keep drifting back to his sister, Turtle, who he last saw alive in this exact station, before she died under a collapsed roof in Thailand. In the end Paul only manages to make one drawing of a