Well, let us remember that strictly speaking a theme is a
comment or lesson about life that can be learnt from the story. You have just chosen a
quote that is more accurately a topic. The question you need to ask yourself is what is
the author saying through this topic. I will help by giving you a few quotes to think
about that should hopefully get you started and help you to consider this in more
detail.
The most appropriate quote that you need to
consider comes in the final paragraph of the story, and comes just after the quote that
you have chosen to base your essay on. Describing the experience of falling with her
mother after being rescued from the burning house, the narrator
says:
Curled
as I was, against her stomach, I was not startled by the cries of the crowd or the
looking faces. The wind roared and beat its hot breath at our back, and flames whistled.
I slowly wondered what would happen if we missed the circle or bounced out of it. Then I
wrapped my hands around my mother's
hands.
You might like to
consider the way that the narrator experiences a tremendous sense of calm and unity
whilst going through quite a scary experience. This of course is paralleled in the first
accident that the narrator's mother experienced, when she told her
daughter:
My
mother once said that I'd be amazed at how many things a person can do within the act of
falling... But I also think she meant that even in that awful doomed second one could
think, for she certainly
did.
Perhaps the story's
message in relation to the topic you have selected relates to the elasticity of time,
and the way that even in a fall that takes a second it sometimes feels that we have
hours to think and respond.
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