Obsession In Stewart O´nan's Land Of The Lost

Without obsession, life is little to nothing. However, when the obsession begins to take a hold of one’s life and becomes a ritual that has to be done on a regular basis, in addition to undertake the procedure of stripping one´s life of everything unrelated to the obsession. This is where the obsession it starts to get out of hand. Such an obsession plays a major role in the short story Land of the Lost written by Stewart O´Nan, where the reader follows a lonely woman, who has nothing else to preoccupy herself with but to attempt to solve the mystery of where a murderer buried a dead girl. Throughout the short story the reader witness the woman’s decent into obsession, seemingly without any way out.
In Stewart O´Nan’s short story “Land of

The narrator’s opinions are not laid out for the reader, leaving us to form our own opinions and thoughts as to why the woman has become obsessed with finding the girl. The narrator knows what the woman thinks and feels, although the woman’s thoughts that the narrator tells the reader is somewhat limited. Nonetheless this insight into the main character shows that the narrator is an omniscient narrator. The narrator also seems trustworthy, simply because the narrator is not biased and lets the reader form their own theories. The narrator tells the story chronologically without flashbacks or flash-forwards. Furthermore the narrator technique is also reminiscent to the one used Hemmingway’s, “Hills Like White Elephants” this is due to the fact that in both stories the reader is given little to no background information, which leaves the reader to formulate their own ideas and theories as to why the main characters are behaving oddly. However Hemmingway’s, “Hills Like White Elephants” is far more minimalistic, and the narrator is slightly more observant than Stewart O´Nan’s narrator in Land of the