The author in Go Ask Alice explains her view of life in her diary. Her view of life and living changes throughout the story as she experiences deaths, drugs, and personal struggles. Near the beginning of her diary, she writes about how when she dies she wanted to be crimated instead of buried. She explains how the thought of being burried scares her and how the worms and maggots will eat your skin while you are dead. The idea of maggots eating people's dead bodies comes back several times throughout the story. As for living, her ideas of living changes as she gets into her drug addiction and experiences many hardships.
The first example is when she is staying at her grandparent's house for summer break. One day during her stay her grandfather suffers a small heart attack. Later on in the story, both her grandparents end up passing away and she explains how she can imagine them being eaten by maggots. She says this since they both were burried and not crimated. The thought continues to nag her the more she thinks about her grandparent's death.
The last example is when she was clean of drugs and she went to babysit for her neighbor, due to the original babysitter not being able to make it. While babysitting, she found that there was a bag of chocolate covered peanuts on the counter. Thinking the neighbor left it for her, she ate some of the peanuts. She brings up the fact about how her grandfather used to love eating chocolate covered peanuts. Not knowing she had been drugged, she got high and started seeing her dead grandfather standing before her. Knowing he's dead, she talks about how she saw maggots crawling in and out of him and continuing to eat his body. She tries killing the maggots but more and more appear and they star...
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...s how great it felt being high. Later on she writes about how easily she became addicted to the drugs and how hard it was for her to stop using them. She writes about how running away and cutting her ties with all her drug user friends didn't help her stop. It also taught me the extent of what drugs can do to you by her getting so high to the point of imagining maggots eating at her body.
A shape that represents this story is a star. I choose a star because each point represents each issue that the protaginist faces. The first and second point represent her crushes and her weight loss. The third and fourth point represent her social acceptence and her drug addiction, while the last point represents her difficulty relating to her parents. I think overall that each point shows what bothers the diarist the most throughout her life, before and after using drugs.
Kerman effectively conveys her story to her audience while also sending a message about the war on drugs and faults in the federal correction system. She uses this position to input her own ideas and show how her opinions have changed with experience. For example, when she started getting involved with the drug world, she did not know the harm that she was doing to all of the people who did the drugs she helped smuggle the money for. During her time in jail she reflected on all of the bad things she did and she realized how much harm she probably caused all of those people she provided the drugs for. From this change in opinion one can see the views of Kerman that sets the tone of the book.
She dedicates this book to her “..family, and all the families whose lives have been touched by the monster.” Kristina talks about what a horrible person her mother is; a wannabe writer who never spends enough time with her daughter. A step dad who always has a stick up his butt. A brother who is spoiled and is too caught up in sports and video games to notice any change. Her sister is wonderful, but recently came out as a lesbian and caused distance between them so she moved away. Kristina was alone, until she met “the monster”. “The monster” is just a metaphor Ellen uses to describe the drug Methamphetamine, better known a Crystal Meth. Crystal meth can be eaten, snorted up the nose, or
	Lisa Shilling starts off as any normal teenager, attending school, going out with friends, and even dating. As the novel progresses, Lisa slips into dark, depressive moods on occasional days, and then into depression altogether. Lisa’s friends notice her change and take it into their own hands to give her "therapy" because Lisa’s parents are not willing to accept her sickness. As the depression progresses, many frightening incidents happen, but Lisa’s friends stick with her, helping to give strength to Lisa as well as themselves.
From the cigarette they shared to the Ferrari ride, she risks her life to be with this so called “man”. “Silence. She was looking at Lenny’s legs, how white the exposed skin was. She was thinking that he brought his sick body to her, that he was bloated, enormous with pathology and bad history, with jails and demented resentments”(98). What she thinks of him represents what happened in the past and what will happen to her if she decides to continue her drug use. “Bad history” and “jails” are only two small snippets of her previous life that she tries to forget but cannot due to Lenny. By bringing “his sick body to her”, she will be relapse. His disgusting figure repulses her because she tries as hard as she can to resist temptation. The image in her head must be ugly so she does not fall back on old habits. The more time she spends with him the more handsome he becomes, pulling her in to using once more. For now he looks ugly because she does not want anything to do with drugs but in time they become more enticing and alluring. Her mind tricks her into thinking that Lenny will eventually stop but he does the exact opposite. He ceases to exist as a real human being and prevails solely in her mind. She thinks that his Ferrari, drugs, and mansion are real but they are not and he represents the drugs she takes. With how “white” his skin looks, it means that she has
At the end she risks her life and becomes a pretty to become and experiment to David’s moms to test a cure to the brain lesions created when they go ... ... middle of paper ... ... o save them from going through a transformation that will change them forever. The moral of the book is you don’t have to get surgery to look a certain way.
In the end, the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, finds herself alienated from that society. The drug culture plays a big role in this sense of isolation. The world around Oedipa seems to be a world consistently on drugs, manic and full of conspiracies and illusions. And though that world is exciting and new, it is also dangerous: drugs contribute to the destruction of Oedipa's marriage, and drugs cause Hilarius to go insane. Oedipa hallucinates so often that she seems to be constantly high, and ultimately, this brings her nothing but a sense of chaotic
As a small child, about two years old, Lizzie's mother died. Her father, Andrew, married again. Lizzie did not like her stepmother even though she did not really remember her real mother at all. She never really accepted her stepmother as the person who raised her. And then one afternoon they were robber sunk in the house a...
Which only adds an extra weight to the struggles she’s having being a wife and mother. The fact that she has to wash her daughter’s diapers, she was in the back yard with the field mice, indicates that they don’t have much money. “But she saw diapers steaming on the line” (2-3). This line suggests, not only did they not have a washer and dryer but they still had to use clothes lines. There are not too many families that still use clothes lines or don’t have washer and dryers. Having to hand wash everything is a job by alone. “And just what was mother doing out back with the field mice” (15-17)? The woman being outside with the field mice makes me think maybe they didn’t live close to the city. Auditory imagery is expressed in these lines. “Sometimes there were things to watch the pinched armor of a vanished cricket, a floating leaf” (8-10). It’s easy to feel the feelings the woman is feeling during this
She is welcomed back warmly by her family, but finds herself ostracized by the community and has difficulty keeping her resolve to avoid drugs. She soon weakens and, while high, runs away again. She spends time living on the streets, a period during which her diary is not dated and entries were purportedly recorded on scraps of paper or paper napkins. She finds herself having sexual relations with strangers and loses track of everything. When she returns home she vows to stay completely off drugs, and succeeds. However, she is again ostracized by her former friends who continue to label her a police informant, and is ignored by the "square" kids. While babysitting, Alice is drugged without her knowledge.
...e last beating she received from Hy-Lo, a recovery from the loss of her cat, a recovery from the emotional stress of listening to her mother and brother get beaten, and eventually a recovery from a broken life. The importance of the theme of forgiveness cannot be overlooked either as she struggles to leave behind the man that stole the childhood she deserved to have. He seems warmer and dies almost immediately after she forgives him, almost as if he too needed to be forgiven in order to move on. She is able to face the future by obtaining recovery through forgiveness, forgiveness through understanding, and understanding through confronting her past. McFadden paints a vivid picture and helps us understand the impacts of an abusive past in a very real way that leaves a deep impact on the reader. Even though it's difficult to read about abuse, I thought this was a good
The purpose of my paper is to evaluate the reasons as to why Whitney Houston began to use drugs and how it played a professional and personal role in her life. I have utilized th...
She kind of abused the substance to the point where she used prostitution to get the drugs and later died of a drug overdose. This book was published in the form of a diary in entry form of a girl’s drug addiction. The characters in this novel are introduced to drugs, sexual activities and abuse.
An example is her torture during the majority of the book. In 6th grade she went to her friends party, and to her astonishment, a couple began making out in the closet. She called her mom to tell her what was going on and her mom told the mother ...
Drug leads to individual’s mental and physical collapse; “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” and “Work” both convey this by abrupt and confusing plot that follows narrator’s stream of consciousness, and unique figurative language. However, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” delineates protagonist’s destruction more directly. Jesus’ Son provides readers with second hand experience of being high on drugs by unique tone and diction that emulates the experience of drug addicts almost perfectly.
It started off as a little something to calm her nerves but ended up as something much worse. She started to become numb to the haunted feelings and rage, but the tables turned. The haunted that she would carry with her now followed her like a lost puppy. Everywhere she chose to go everything she decided to do was haunted, but she was numb and unaware and had a false feeling that she was okay. The people around her told her it was okay, and so did the illegal things she was inhaling. The haunted the hurt and pain didn’t bother her as much