Bulbjerg (Sebastian R. and Oskar)

Bulbjerg is not the typical short story, in this short story the normal everyday situation blows up to be nothing less than a chaotic storm of emotions and thoughts.
The story revolves around a Danish family consisting of the father, the mother Anne and the adopted son from Vietnam Sebastian. The family decided to take a trip to a nearby beautiful nature scenery only a few kilometers from Bulbjerg, but as the trip evolves so does the situation between the characters in the story. Sebastian hurts his head bad in a fall from a bike, an affair gets exposed and a mystic stranger, also with the name of Sebastian, gets involved in the conflict.

In Bulbjerg the main conflict of the story is the distancing in the narrator’s and his wife, Anne’s relationship, which ultimately leads to a direct confrontation where the narrator admits to having an affaire with Anne’ sister. Especially the language used enforces the idea that the narrator and Anne are distancing themselves from each other. Whenever the narrator describes Anne, he does so in a tone and style which makes it seem as if he is looking down upon her. His focus, when Anne is mentioned, is only on the things that they do not have in common instead of the ones that brings them closer to each other (if there are any). Before the unhappy confrontation, the narrator refers to Anne as “You” making it sound as if he is talking directly to her. However, after the narrator brings his affair into the open, Anne’s only reference is “her”. This small but paramount change in the way Anne is referenced to, is critical to the underlying fact that Anne and the narrator are splitting.

The language in this short story is modern, with mostly short sentences. When Naja Marie Aidt describes the settings through the narrator we get a point of view from the narrator, this means that he is a first person narrator. So due to that, all of the expressions we get come through him and only him. We can therefore also be certain that much of what the narrator describes is properly not entirely true since his judgments and memory was properly clouded by his instinctive feelings. One such example of this is at the end of the story where the narrator “think he saw” Anne kissing passionately with the older Sebastian. The narrator makes this kiss sound lovingly passionate so as to justify his actions with Tine.

Since the story is narrated through the main character, the dad, it is also through him that we learn about his emotion. The way the narrator's emotions are expressed stay true to the style of writing we call “Show, don’t tell”. We, the readers, are never told specifically how the narrator himself feels. Instead we have to read between the lines when he describes what is happening in order to understand his emotions.  The narrator always has a feeling as if something is going to happen. When he throws Sebastian’s bike into the shrubbery he sees it as a possible evidence, almost like a crime was committed right here. Without knowing that he actually is guilty of being unfaithful, the state of mind he presents to us in the beginning suggests that he has a guilty conscience.

The father/narrator is a very dominating person, he yells at his son and wife and he seems to be always angry about something. The narrator also has great love for his adopted son and he has an unquenchable thirst after Anne’s sister, Tine. Tine is younger than Anne, we don’t get much to know about her only the way the narrator describes her, which is mostly with a sexual and erotic feeling. The narrator is of the describing type, since he is the one describing the weather, landscape and the expressions the other show.

The characters in this short story are metaphorically voiced through their interactions with the animals around them. Whenever the persons feel something there is an animal depicting the same thing.  In the beginning we have some birds singing and screeching depicting the mood at the family, one of them seems angry about something while the others seem happy enough. I am not sure what the ants depict but it could be a way of telling that Sebastian would be “drowned” in emotions when the following episode happens. In the end the full grown man, also called Sebastian, is criticized by the narrator that, “he looks like a monkey”. This is very ironic since it is actually himself who is acting like the animal. Even the young Sebastian expresses through his actions when he instinctively grabs hold of the narrators hair when he is scared.

When Sebastian falls and hits his head the dog barks aggressively because of Anne’s feeling towards the episode of him pushing her away and telling her about the affair, when the dog starts to whimper instead it is Anne that realizes that her feelings towards the narrator are over, she gets left behind, the narrator does not love her anymore. When the narrator walks down the hill towards the takeaway, he feels free after telling Anne about his affair with Tine, and a butterfly appears right before his eyes, an animal light on its wings with nothing bad on its mind.

Bulbjerg is one of the many short stories that come from the short story collection “Bavian” written by Naja Marie Aidt. The general theme of the short story collection is everyday scenarios exploding due to the overly present instincts of the main characters. It is these instinctive feelings that fuel the characters of the stories propelling the conflicts to immeasurable heights, and after reading the story, we can affirm that the story does indeed stay true to these terms.