How Does Melissa Balmain Show the Character of the Narrator in This Poem?

How does Melissa Balmain show the character of the narrator in this poem?

Melissa Balmain’s poem ‘Facebook Psycho’ is about a character who has a Facebook friend request ignored or rejected by someone else. The character’s feelings are hurt and, in revenge, they kill the other person.

Balmain shows the reader that her character is mentally unstable. The poem’s title ‘Facebook Psycho’ tells readers that the character is insane because of the word ‘psycho’. This word makes us think of violence and unpredictability which tells us that the character – the ‘Facebook Psycho’ – is irrational and unstable.

The poet uses actions and description to suggest that her character doesn’t cope well with rejection. The speaker ‘friended’ the other person, but they didn’t respond in the way the speaker wanted: ‘you didn’t friend me back’. As a result, the speaker is left ‘feeling powerless’. The adjective ‘powerless’ suggests that the speaker feels upset and a bit defeated when other people aren’t friendly.

The poet presents the speaker as angry and vengeful. The words ‘attack’, ‘avenge’ and the made-up verb ‘enemied’ show that the characterwants to hurt the other person in revenge for not accepting the friend request. However, the poet also shows us how hurt the speaker has been: the word ‘wounded’encourages us to sympathise with the ‘psycho’ a little bit because their feelings have been hurt and we can understand that sometimes it’s tempting to hurt people back. The image of the ‘cyber-slap’ also shows us how the speaker felt; the rejection on Facebook hurt as much as a real life ‘slap’ would do.

The poet definitely shows that the main character really wants revenge. The line ‘the software wouldn’t mark you “enemied”’shows that the character tried to take revenge on Facebook, but the software wouldn’t let them – you can add and remove friends on Facebook, but you can’t mark people as ‘enemies’. The poet moves on from the ‘software’ to the ‘devoted blade’ which shows how violent and angry the character is. The character thinks that the blade is a much better way of showing someone that they’d been ‘enemied’: ‘there’s nothing like an old-school killer app.’

The poet uses a very regular rhyme scheme in this poem: ABAB, also known as alternate rhyming couplets. For a poem about murder and a psycho, this rhyme scheme might seem unusual as it is very regular and simple.Perhaps the regularity of the rhyme scheme shows how the speaker likes to be in control; on the other hand, perhaps the simplicity of the ABAB rhyme scheme is meant to contrast with the violence in the poem, revealing just how psychotic the ‘Facebook Psycho’ is.