Quote Originally Posted by olgaa
1
I put on my costume - dark jeans, black T-shirt, a pair of Adidas trainers. From a drawer in my mother's dressing table I took a pair of think black leather goves. They were a tight fit and smelled faintly of perfume. I had THE two canvas bags, one folded inside the other, along with a torch and some old NEWSPAPERS.


...wrapped them in sheets of NEWSPAPER....

the question is why do they use THE before these bags if they are mentioned for the first time only???

and then they don't use 'the' before 'sheets of newspaper' though we know which sheets exactly
If the canvas bags have not been mentioned before in the text, I would read this as "inner monologue" of the character. The character herself already knows she will need bags for whatever she is doing that night. So - the first part of the paragraph is reporting to the reader "I did this, I did that" and the second part - "I had THE two bags . . . a torch and some old newspapers" becomes a part of her thoughts. She is looking at the pile of things she has collected, and she is confirming in her mind that she has the items SHE knew she needed before the beginning of the story.

Is that at all clear? I think this is subjective, though. It's a subtle point.

As for "sheets of newspaper" - it is not important to the narrator HOW MANY or WHICH sheets of newspaper she used. The important information is that the item has been wrapped in newspaper.

Example:

My mom sees me packing a glass in a box. She says to me: "It won't break if its wrapped in sheets of newspaper. Here are some."

Ten minutes later, she comes back and says to me, "HEY! Shari! Why didn't you wrap the glass in the sheets of newspaper I gave you?"

In the first sentence, the wrapping is more important than the newspaper. In the second, the specific sheets of newspaper she gave me are the important part.