Living in the postmodern world is so much different from living in any other era, thus far – we are fumbling around. We are groping our way towards something we do not know exactly what is. Religion has almost disappeared from our minds. We are not really sure who Noah was or what the seventh Commandment is. There was a time where all our doubts could be answered – answered by God. There was a time when the last thing we did before going to sleep in the evening was saying a prayer thanking God for surviving yet another day. Today what we do when we are all tucked up in bed is getting a lot of blue light straight in our faces – we check Instagram to see various bloggers’ healthy and delicious food, skinny fitness gurus telling us all the things we are doing wrong with our lifestyles. We go on Facebook to see how many of our friends have been engaged today and we open our favourite news-app to see how many cruelties were committed during the course of the day while we are reminded how fat we are, how lonely we are and how the world is a terrible place. We feel guilty and alienated. And then we get a text from our boss telling us to work more and more and harder and harder. And we nod and say “ok”, get too little sleep, get fatter and fatter, lonelier and lonelier and more and more alienated from the world around us. This is something that we are surely all familiar with to some extent. We go with the tide, accomplish things, we are never sufficient and although we look like we are having the time of our lives we always want something else. The outer facades are rock-hard while our inner façades that we put up for ourselves are slowly dissolving. We are not sure what the purpose of life is and while we work hard we always seek something else. We sort of end up disappearing into a hyper reality.
This is what happens in the short story “Number 40” written by Sarah Butler in 2012. The main character called Melissa, is living her life going with the tide – she does not question it she just does it. But it does not make her happy. She lives in a sad world – in a dejected environment where she is constantly feeling blue. The story is very psychological and crammed with symbols which describes the postmodern world, and how it can affect people. Melissa does not like change – she is clinging to what she knows: “Wallet, umbrella, diary, keys – their absence always left her feeling anxious and unbalanced. Today it was her phone.” When she does something which is not a part of her daily routine, which is not rehearsed she feels uneasy. This particular morning, she had forgotten her phone – a postmodern human’s best friends. This means that this day she is not able so see her reality through another medium – she has no choice but to experience the reality herself. She cannot rely on the phone to entertain her an keep her busy she is forced to experience and perhaps think for herself. On her way to work – which is where she always goes – she watches the raindrops chase each other down the bus window: “She looked instead out of the window at the pavement, which, when she narrowed her eyes enough to blur her vision, turned into a continuous grey line.” The environment and Melissa’s state of mind is set with this quote. Water usually symbolises chaos which is exactly Melissa’s state of mind. Furthermore the fact that the author points out that she can see a grey line tells us even more about how Melissa is feeling and what the environment is like: The line symbolises a border or a deadlock but it can also symbolise a direction – but then the fact that it is blurred means that the direction in her life may not be neither clear nor the right one. Throughout the story this water is mentioned multiple times but it seems to be when the chaos in her life worsens. This has a strong effect on the reader who is dragged into the mind of Melissa – we get to feel her state of chaos. But not only is the rain used to describe the depressed environment; the colour grey recurs throughout the story symbolising depression and perhaps grief. This makes it clear to the reader that Melissa is not in a happy place but she does, most likely, not know it. She has a boyfriend with whom she lives together, she has a job and whatnot and she has been on a vacation in Greece which makes her happy to think about: “This time last year they’d been in Santorini – a cluster of bright white buildings clinging to the remnants of a volcano… “ Again the author uses colours to describe the setting – white symbolising the peace and perfection – which is the opposite of her daily life. This feeling of blue is tearing Melissa apart and is making her more and more distanced from the world around her. She is wandering around without any direction, like a ghost: “Underneath the fluorescent lights her face was pasty white. Even her hands, when she rubbed them against her cheeks to try and conjure up a bit of colour, looked like they’d been refrigerated.” She is practically a ghost – a ghost in the sense that she is troubled psychologically. She is not sure what life is all about. And this is where the religiosity comes in. As Melissa leaves works and heads home she thinks about her life, her eternally unfinished house and how her boyfriend most likely is cheating on her. And then she mentions that she and her boyfriend lives in number 40. As every religious person would probably know the Christian Lent is 40 days long, Moses wandered 40 years in the dessert and Moses was also on Mount Sinai for 40 days and nights. Therefore the number 40 represents not only trial but also the completeness which comes afterwards. To Melissa having a boyfriend, a house and life in that way is exactly completeness. So when she comes home and realises that there is in fact no number 40 her life collapses. Or, has it not been collapsed from the very beginning? This is where reality and the psychological state of mind fuse and the reader realises that the story is not so much about the physical location of Melissa but that the setting of the text is more of a psychological landscape. Maybe Melissa is dreaming herself away from her everyday life. She is trying to find a meaning of life, which before was found through religion. She is trying to find a very prosaic thing: Love and security but she is too alienated from the world – she is afraid, isolated and rootless. Her relationship is either non-existent or very shallow. She imagines this perfect house with this perfect guy: “Similar, yes, but heavier around the face, with thinner, greyer hair…” This shows that what she wishes for might not even exist and then the bedrock of her existence is robbed from her. The direction she thought she had might not be the right one or maybe not even exist. This is a perfect example of a hyper reality which postmodernists like to write about – Sarah Butler included. The narrator is a 3rd person narrator with a limited view which makes us sympathise with Melissa and experience the life through her eyes but told through an indeterminate person. The reader is left with a feeling of emptiness and sadness and even a feeling of being able to relate to Melissa’s situation which also is the theme of this short story. In that way the story is also a critique of our post modern societies with all what that entails.
So maybe we should just stop and think sometimes. Society requires so much from us – friends, family, work etc. Our lives have to be perfect and we have to make lives perfect. But maybe we sometimes loose direction in life – a direction which we do not have because religion has disappeared from our minds. Maybe we sometimes work so hard that we forget to live and we become miserable. We might need to get back to reality, to not be alienated, to care about other people and find a meaning with our existence and quit living a joyless day to day life. And the only ones who can change that are ourselves – we have to stop and change the conditions of the postmodern society. Maybe we need to stop clinging to the known and venture into the unknown. The story is in that way a kind of wake up call to society – to everyone. As number 12 Grimmauld place is concealed with the Fidelius Charm used to conceal a secret inside an individual's soul in the Harry Potter books maybe we and Melissa need to free our souls and look so we can see the hidden gems which are life itself which also seems to be the message of the story “Number 40”.