Summary of Boyles Friendly Skies :: essays research papers

T. Coraghessan Boyles Friendly Skies is the story of Ellen, a woman who is trying to get to get to New York to be with her mom, but has trouble doing so due to several delays. First, the plane has mechanical problems, this is followed by a pilot claim that they have lost their slots for takeoff. When the plane finally leaves LAX, the engine catches on fire, so emergency landing is required. When back at the airport she is only able to get a non-direct flight that stops in Chicago. While on this flight, Ellen reminisces virtually heartbreaking details of her past, so she takes prescription medicine with alcohol to try and diminish her infliction. Eventually, a nervous man who had annoyed Ellen for hours, threatens to kill everyone because he is non happy with the airline service. With her built up frustration, Ellen picks up a fork and stabs the man repeatedly, which helps in restraining him long enough to land in Denver. The central appraisal of the story is that even a calm and constrained person heap have an irrational outburst of emotion if his/her feelings are repressed. The protagonist of the story is Ellen. Ellen is cardinal years old, with limp blond hair and a plain face and whose eyes oozed sympathy. She is also a fifth-grade teacher who has recently left her job after having experienced the embarrassment of a public fight with her partner Roy in front of her colleagues. From the beginning of the story she is frightened, anxious, with head down and shoulders slumped, indicating she has a lot of pain and suffering kept inside her. Doctors have described her as anemic and depressive and she knows that that life she has led so far has contributed for that diagnosis. The protagonist is a dynamic fibre because although she starts as a person who keeps all her emotions to herself, in the end, she explodes and releases her frustration on Mr. Lercher, the passenger who tried to kill everyone on the airplane. Her change in attitude can be observed when th e narrator describes, All she knew was that shed had enough, enough of Roy and this big, drunken testosterone-addled bully and the miserable, crimpled life that awaited her at her mothers, and she came up out of her merchant ship as if shed been launchedThe main conflict is Ellens inner conflict and the effect that her repressed feelings have on her life and her attitudes.