Love (Motif)
The motive of love in the story is represented rather specifically – Nil, Emma’s husband, loves his wife and their children, and he wants to do and does everything to make them feel better. Nil is a carpenter and he works hard every day and after getting back home, instead of rest, he has to do all the housework and look after children, while his wife is doing nothing but blames and judges every his step. This love is strange and hard to understand but these two will never leave each other because they both don’t want to change anything in their lives or they are just too afraid to do it.
Madness (Motif)
Human madness can be and actually is a motif of their actions. They can do terrible things without even realizing them. Emma, for instance, used her madness, or “bad in head” as her son called it, to manipulate with her family – husband and three children. She demands too much from them and never gets enough. She is always irritated, her own children are afraid of her – that is not the image of a perfect mother. Maybe, it was not because she wanted to be such person, it was her mental issues which turned her into bad mother and wife.
Hell of the childhood (Allegory)
In a family where are problems between parents, children will always feel discomfort; they will care about it much more than parents think they do. In this story, the mother was screaming at the father because she had problems with her mental health; the father couldn’t do anything about it. The children lived though all their life with the knowledge that their mother doesn’t love them and all those constant fights between parents were the allegory of hell to them. Hell of the childhood. It is also a paradox because childhood is usually described as the best time of life, but here we can see completely another situation.
Old Year (Symbol)
The events in the story take place in New Year eve. The carpenter Nil comes home after work and does his daily routine – and looks after his sick son and mad wife. He is exhausted, but he never shows it, because he knows that no one except him will do his work. He cares for his sick son and they go to sleep. Son wanted to talk to his dad because his mother never talked to him, and even now she told father to make the boy stop talking. he (the son) closed her eyes, pretending to sleep, and then he actually fell asleep. The Old Year had died, just like many other years before and nothing had changed. Here, the Old Year symbolizes the past.
