English (Core) · Ch 8 — Going Places
Themes
Themes
"Going Places" is a small story with a large emotional reach, and several interlocking themes give it depth.
Fantasy and hero-worship as escape
The most obvious theme is the use of daydreams to escape a bleak reality. Sophie's world offers her very little — a poor home, a tired family, and the near-certain prospect of monotonous factory work. Rather than accept this, she retreats into vivid fantasies of boutiques, acting and fashion design, and above all into an imagined relationship with the football star Danny Casey. Her hero-worship of Casey is the purest form of this escape: by attaching herself in imagination to a glamorous, admired figure, she borrows some of his excitement and lifts herself, for a while, out of her ordinary life. Barton treats this longing with sympathy, but he also shows how it can slide from harmless dreaming into self-deception.
The gap between dreams and real possibilities
Running alongside this is the theme of the distance between what Sophie dreams of and what life is actually likely to give her. Her ambitions are grand, but she has no money, no connections and no realistic path towards them, a point the down-to-earth Jansie keeps making. The story does not mock Sophie's dreams, but it steadily contrasts their brightness with the grey facts of her circumstances, so that the reader feels the ache of the gap. This tension between aspiration and probability is what gives the story its quiet sadness.
The pain of growing up
"Going Places" is also a study of adolescence, that unsettled stage between childhood and adulthood. Sophie is old enough to want a richer, more exciting life but too young and too powerless to reach it. She stands on the edge of the adult world — represented by her working brother Geoff and the unknown places he goes — and yearns to enter it, yet she remains shut out. Her fantasies are partly the natural imaginings of a young person testing possible identities, and the disappointment of the ending is part of the hard education of growing up: learning that the world does not bend to one's wishes.