\'Nine Days\' sample essay 1 loss and hope sample essay PDF

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Sample essay of Nine Days with the prompt "Nine Days is more about loss than it is hope. Do you agree?"...

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‘Nine Days is more about loss than it is about hope.’ Do you agree?

Toni Jordan’s novel ‘Nine Days’ weaves together stories of individuals across eras in order to highlight the concepts of connection and uniqueness between individuals. One of the elements of this connection that Jordan explores is the idea that both loss and hope are fundamental parts of the human condition, as each helps to shape individuals as well as their relationships with their respective worlds. All of her characters experiences losses that dictate their attitudes and decisions, yet through both individual character trajectories, and the narrative arc of the whole novel, Jordan proves that hope is also a crucial element in many of their lives. Jordan also exposes how even when loss forms part of the context of an individual’s life, this can work to shape characters’ hopeful attitudes and approaches to life.

Through her use of individual characters’ life trajectories, Jordan demonstrates the fundamental role that loss and hope play in shaping individual’s attitudes. Initial losses lead to a hopeful outlook for characters in either the short or long term, but the characters’ lives taken as a whole prove that both concepts are crucial in shaping their decisions. For Kip, the death of his father means further immediate loss in terms of his access to education and the freedom to choose his own path as he must contribute financially to his struggling family. However, at this early stage of his life, Jordan characterises Kip as a resilient character who is determined to still wrangle a sense of agency out of situations where he has relatively little; as he states in regards to his working instead of being at school that he is his ‘own boss now’, and that he is ‘one of the proper workers’. His refusal to let lack of education limit his hopes in terms of career potential means that he eventually becomes a photographer, as he is open to seizing opportunities. Further still, his love of photography could have easily been marred by the death of Connie, as it is through and of her that he comes into the career as the photograph of her, ‘was the first one he ever took’. Even though he experienced the death of his father and worked as a manual labourer for the Hustings due to him losing his access to education, these early moments of his life are shown to contribute to an essentially hopeful attitude later on. Kip’s own daughter describes her father as ‘the most loving man I know’, which is potentially a direct response to his intimate understanding of loss due to the death of both his father, sister, and the insurmountable loss of life he no doubt experienced during the Second World War. Thus, the plethora of losses that Kip experiences ultimately led to an essentially hopeful outlook on life; seizing job opportunities where they arose, and loving his family as a man in place of the family he couldn’t love as a boy.

A further way that Jordan uses individual character’s life trajectories to emphasise the roles of both loss and hope in shaping characters’ attitudes is when she places relatively optimistic characters in contexts that seem at odds with this. Charlotte faces contextual factors that seem counterintuitive in terms of her hoping to achieve the traditional markers of a successful life, markers that are hugely influenced by gender norms. Charlotte loses the option of obtaining a nuclear family unit when the father of her first child seems to lack the desire to fulfil that role as she tries to imagine herself married to him parenting the child but ‘[t]he image will not come’. However despite this, Jordan characterises her as a person who is relentlessly optimistic about the world around her. In manmade objects she sees ‘the hopes of the human spirit’ and that ‘[humans can make something beautiful … from things that would be inconsequential by themselves’. This sentiment is mirrored (and perhaps influenced by) Charlotte’s setting; she remembers seeing Nelson Mandela (an individual who was also optimistic in the face of loss of freedom and choice) walking free and witnessing the celebration following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Charlotte faces the same choice as Connie as she decides whether to raise a child without its father, and she ultimately does so successfully as portrayed by the untraditional family unit described in Alec’s chapter.

To complement the individual character trajectories that Jordan uses to expose the way that both loss and hope shape attitudes, the narrative structure of the text as a whole further confirms this reading of the text. Jordan does this through her use of the non-chronological narrative structure and the order of the chapters. Whilst it could be argued that Connie’s life is the least hopeful example of the potential of a woman’s life in the mid-1900s, Jordan chooses to place her chapter as the one that concludes the text. Connie lost her father, her access to education and

as a result her potential future as an artist, her potential to be a respected member of society, the father of her child, the support of her mother, her baby, and ultimately her own life. However as a counterpoint, Connie is also a symbol of the collective hopes of womankind to break out of gendered dictations of a successful life. She has career aspirations and has the respect of male family as shown through Kip’s attitude towards her. Most crucially though, Jordan characterises her as a woman of agency through her final sexual encounter with Jack. She reflects that up until this point she has never achieved what she wanted such that she has ‘given up having desires at all’, but in this moment she knows ‘what it feels like to want and … will give anything to have it’. None of the elements of loss made up the content of Connie’s chapter, as Jordan made the crux of Connie’s chapter about her making a choice that was entirely up to her. The fact that the text ends on this note, suggests that this moment of agency is just as important for the individual as what happens before and after in their life. Each of Jordan’s characters’ chapters focuses on an important moment in their life to highlight this very point. For Connie, her experience is one of hope, potential and power. That the reader knows what happens to Connie casts her decision in a particularly poignant light, but serves to remind the reader that the little moments of positivity and hope are just as important for the individual as those defining experiences of loss. Furthermore, the family endures, even though Connie does not. This idea is also evidenced and served by the non-chronological structure as none of the individual chapters is complete outside of the whole of the text. This is cemented in the final line of both Connie’s chapter and the whole text when Connie concludes that ‘[e]verything will be all right’. Thus, Jordan uses the structure of the text to emphasise the importance of hope contained in an individual moment as well as a collective group’s consciousness, even in the face of overwhelming losses.

Jordan’s text ‘Nine Days’ examines the relationship between hope and loss, and how both are crucial elements in terms of shaping characters’ decisions and attitudes. Individual characters’ life trajectories, how they respond to their individual respective contexts and the text taken as a whole all contribute to the understanding that neither exists without the other, and they are both fundamental elements of life....