Islands by Miles Greenwood

What does Miles Greenwood try to convey by using the pronoun ‘you’ in the short story ‘Islands’? Let’s read.

The story “Islands” by Miles Greenwood is told from a third-person point of view, but we see the story cut from time to time with pieces of information. Some of the information is in the form of talking or more like giving orders. I will deal with the ones that include the ‘’you’’ pronoun or ‘’yuh’’, as they mostly pronounce the word ‘’you’’ like that in the story. The most repeated sentence, including ‘’yuh’’ in the story, ‘’Don’t look back; fix your eyes forward’’ (Greenwood 91), will be my focus. When I read this part, the questions that come to my mind are: Is someone talking to her? Is she talking to herself? Is this the devil whispering in her ear? And can those repetitions only be general statements like a chorus in a poem?

As we can tell from the storyline, she decides to run on her own in her head. So it does not seem very probable to someone near talking to her. There is a slight chance that this is the devil who speaks to her because, in the following lines, I realized some symbolism supporting this idea. ‘’The bus crept down the bumpy, winding road from the hills; the daughter noticed the soil change from the deep red of home to a yellow like the yam in her soup,’’ (Greenwood 91). What I see in these lines is that she believes running away from her home will solve all her problems. The land changes color from the red of the house as a symbol of danger or sacrifice and turns into yellow, which symbolizes joyfulness, happiness, and energy. But as it is seen in the rest of the story, this is an illusion, and no joyfulness, happiness, or energy is waiting for her on the other island. Later, the part ‘’If she squeezed her eyes, she might see home, the father, the mother, the sisters, the brother. Don’t look back; fix your eyes forward but with her eyes fixed forward, the daughter didn’t notice those unseen threads unraveling around her.'' (Greenwood 92) made me sure that she was making a bad decision going to the other island for the son. So if this ‘’yuh’’ refers to a generalized, collective audience, it might be a message that leaving your heritage is not a good thing to do. My idea about the "yuh" is that the daughter is probably speaking to herself either at the time the events happened or in the present and she is the one telling the whole story.

In the following parts, we see she has children, but the children are never mentioned in the story, while the grandchildren are mentioned many times. So here, I started to feel like the ‘’daughter’’ might be the one who tells the whole story. The reason that she never mentions her children might be that she calls herself ‘’daughter’’ and her husband ‘’son’’. It occurred to me that she may have experienced trauma and, as a result, she may have developed a mental illness. She started referring to herself as a daughter. She repeats the same sentences all the time, maybe constantly having flashbacks and missing some important information. There is also a big chance that she could be making up some of these events if she has a mental illness. As we do not have detailed pieces of evidence or hints for her being mentally unstable, it might be speculative to diagnose her with a mental illness such as dissociative identity disorder. However, even if she does not have a mental illness, she may be talking to herself to console herself.

 As a result, I think the pronoun “yuh” refers to our completely fictional character, our daughter. “‘A’ means ‘you’ is a fictional character, so the ‘you’ refers only to a character” (Bell, Ensslin et al. 248). She talks to herself to forget her past and the mistakes she made. At first, it was more like encouraging yourself, but towards the end, it turns into a consolation. So the daughter's internal struggles and the repeated phrases like "Don’t look back/ Fix your eyes forward" (Greenwood 91) suggest psychological tension and inner turmoil.  Although the story does not diagnose the protagonist with a mental illness, her reflective thoughts show she is dealing with inner challenges. The word “yuh” represents more than just talking to herself; it is a way for her to confront her decisions and find peace in a confusing situation. 

Work Cited

Bell, Alice, et al., "A Reader Response Method Not Just for ‘You’." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics, 2019, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 241-262.

Greenwood, Miles. "Islands.” Best British Short Stories 2023, edited by Nicholas Royle, SALT Publishing, October 2023, pp. 89-97.