Roy Spivey

“Roy Spivey”
We all know the constant hype and excitement celebrities bring along whenever they visit a location. People’s personalities have a tendency to change when they face a famous or powerful person. They often become insecure and immensely self-critical, because they feel unimportant compared to someone famous. For some people meeting a famous person can play a very important role in their life. This is exactly what the first person narrator experiences in the short story “Roy Spivey” by Miranda July from 2007, and to top it off the celebrity even tries to start an affair with the first person narrator.

A first-person narrator tells the short story, therefore making it easier for the reader to iden-tify with the first person narrator, because we get an insight in their thoughts and actions. However, we have to remember the possibility of the narrator being unreliable, since we only see things from one perspective.
The first person narrator is a tall but otherwise undistinguished woman from the middleclass, who hates her normal and boring life. She describes herself as insecure, “If I were a more self-assured person I would not have volunteered to give up my seat on an overcrowded flight […]” , and calls herself a pushover, “This was my reward for being a pushover.” , which also shows that she is very passive and that she is easily affected by others. She fears that she is too plain and normal for Roy Spivey, “I looked in the mirror while I was peeing and wondered if I was the plainest person he had ever talked to” ; this fear of being too plain arises, because Roy Spivey is a famous person. Roy gives the first person narrator his nanny’s private number and this number becomes symbolic to the first person narrator through...

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... “Screaming Beatles Fan” (1960s) shows how people can act to-tally crazy when meeting or seeing a famous person. In “Roy Spivey” the first person nar-rator is nowhere nearly as fanatic about meeting a famous person, but it does have great impact on her life. Both the text and the picture show how much impact famous people can have on our lives.

From my most central analysis of the characters, themes, and the social environment, I have found that this short story describes the feelings, thoughts, and personality changes people experience when meeting a famous person to be very accurate. To emphasize this even further, I put the story in perspective to the picture “Screaming Beatles Fan” and the poem “Elvis Kissed Me”, which had some slight differences to “Roy Spivey”, but it made the themes and the personality changes when meeting a famous person even more distinct.