speech acts with many different kinds of illocutionary force. For instance:Why did he do this to me? He said he loved me. How could he go out with her and not care how I feel. I can not handle this on top of GCSEs and Mum’s problem. The coursework is getting to much for me to copy with. I’m going to fail my exams. I wish I could just die, then I wouldn’t be a problem to anyone.
Mum’s drinking is getting worse I can not handle it. She hides the bottles and is furious if I find them and Gary is useless he just sticks up for her because he drinks himself. I’m so confused all we do is fight. Whenever I’m at home it is always fighting. I want out of all of it. Please make it all stop. Take the confusion away.
I’m all a lone, nobody cares whether I live or die. All I ever do is cause problems for everyone. How can I get him back. He doesn’t know how much he means to me and my life. I don’t have a life without him.
Mum and Gary have left me here on my own. Can’t they see how bad I am. Don’t they care. Please God do something for me and make this my time to go. I am no good at school and I’m so ugly nobody wants to care for me. I’m so stupid to think that he could’ve cared for me.
It goes on like this for another ten paragraphs, swinging between complaint, accusation, self-condemnation, self-pity, pleading, anger, fear and despair, addressed sometimes to her family, sometimes indirectly to the boyfriend who jilted her, sometimes to God, sometimes to herself, in sentences that switch from declarative to interrogative to imperative. I thought about Alex Loom’s hypothesis that suicidal despair might raise the level of the subject’s normal expressive skills and I couldn’t see any evidence of it here. But if you give the document a literary reading the context gives the naïve style a poignant effectiveness - even her mistakes acquire a kind of eloquence. ‘I’m all a lone’ might be Gerard Manley Hopkins. Her inability to ‘copy with’ her classes is like a Freudian slip revealing her recourse to plagiarism.The loose punctuation conveys the urgency of her distress and the confusion of her mind with a stream-of-consciousness effect, and as the letter goes on the present tense creates a powerful narrative momentum: ‘I keep thinking about the pills in the cabinet but I’m scared.’ The letter ends:I’m so cold, please do something. I can’t stand this empty feeling that I’m having. My head is horrible. Stop the pounding it hurts so much. I have no control over anything in my life. I’m breaking into pieces.
Somebody do something.
If it were a short story one would say that the three-word final paragraph was masterly in its simplicity. But this of course was not at all how the letter would have been read by those to whom it was primarily addressed, or those who found it; and to respond to it aesthetically, analysing it like a literary text, seems a somewhat callous procedure, indifferent to the human pain it describes. It was a relief to discover from a footnote that in this particular case the writer survived the overdose and ‘moved forward with her life’. The letter is in fact posted on a suicide prevention website.
12th November. I phoned Dad, as I always do on a Sunday evening, at about six o’clock. Because he is expecting the call he answers promptly. I bought him a new phone recently, with big number pads like an educational toy and a volume control which he keeps permanently in the ‘Maximum’ position. I had a new socket for it fitted in the dining room. Before that, when the telephone was in the hall, it could ring for five minutes before he heard it. Tonight he must have been sitting beside the phone because he picks it up and bellows ‘Hallo’ after only one ring.
At first he sounds in a reasonably good mood. He managed to cook a small lamb joint for his lunch without burning or setting fire to anything, and is feeling pleased with himself. ‘I think I’ve got that stove beaten now,’ he says. ‘And the joint will last me for a good few days.’ But it’s not long before he’s complaining of not sleeping well and having to get up four or five times in the night. We