The Upset

Analysis of drama.

I was not impressed the story of The Upset by Roxanne Sky. I could sense the author makes the dialogue is unnatural and the setting's a little bit weird. The story is pressented by a single narrator as the main character. And I could sense the character's accusing people without good reason/evidence as she narrated the story from her own point of view. Roxanne writing's style took advantage of the uses of italic,dash and exclamation point to create the character’s narration that seemed like direct speeches as if the characters were talking to each other. At the same time, such writing style succeeded in giving an illusion.

You can read the script, here.

The story begins with Ada's statment, mother of the dead soldier, "Goodbye Aiden". The punctuation marks: exclaimation point, dash and the italic word imply that the character was speaking. From this passage, the word "goodbye" clearly gives us a clue that the character was felt lost for the death of her son on the battlefield. Then, her husband, David, comforting her. It also proves that the character is a very loving person and from that dialogue it is showing her feeling was very sad.

In first-page-lenght of her story,  the character instead that she was curious about several times. It implies there are other characters in the story, have made her curious. This curiosity occurred because the two drunken boys came to the funeral soldier. We must always be vigilant but we must not accuse someone carelessly without evidence. In this case, I feel that the character is curious but the character accuses other characters that are not good.

She was really curious about the two boys, worried even. "Who's there?... What are you doing here?" It is natural if we try to eliminate any threats that come to us, as a defense action. In this case, the character felt worried by the two boys. From the dialogue, it is revealing the character personalities that she was curious person like the author point of view or we called this Gyno. And the character begins to accuse other characters with no evidence, "Go away. You have no respect for the dead. Especially you.---Don't act dumb. It's because of your kind that my boy is in the ground." The character start intimidating the two boys. Especially Ali, because he look like a Middle-Easterns and her son was died on the battlefield who was fighting Afganistan. "No I'm completely fine. The Middle-Easterns killed my little boy for nothing.---My son is dead and you call me irrational. My son died because of your brothers back in Afghanistan. It's because of yourself that he's dead." From this dialogue, it is revealing the character feelings. Such as anger, sad, depressed, frustrated, and hateful. In her speak, a few mouners just trust her words without any deterrence. "A few mourners gasp at ADA's audacity." Ali didn't feel accepted with the accusations he had, and his friend John, try to suggest Ali away. But Ali respectfully accepted all the accusations received by him because he understood that she was grieving the loss of her son "I'm sorry for your loss and what they did to him."

At the end of the story, I felt sorry for the character. Her sadness has made her do the pointless accusations. Why it is pointless? Because her sadness had taken over her logic, she vent her anger towards the wrong person. And I don't like her attitude when accusing Ali with his Middle Eastern look and accuse people with this kind of look is bad because they killed her son. Like the title "The Upset" means that the character was upset, sad, frustated, stressful about her dead son.