Analysis Of Mitchell Stephens

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Recommended: Mental illness and oppression in literature

Mitchell Stephens plays on our emotions in so many different ways in this novel. At first Stephens comes in almost like a hero, trying to find justice for these hurting people in the small town of. Stephens causes our perspective to change with his statement that “ there are no accidents. I don’t even know what the word means, and I never trust anyone who says he does.” “Someone must be to blame.”

After seeing through his eyes how he was planning on using the pain and hurt from some of the people to try and win his case, he no longer seems like such a hero, but not quite the villain. “But anytime I hear about a case like that school bus disaster up there, I turn into a heat-seeking missal, homing in on a target that I know in my bones is …show more content…

Rather then getting help and support to deal with the depression and the pain from watching his daughter slowly kill herself he is stuck in a cycle of anger and defeatism. Anger can be insidious, and it motivates. Stephens is using anger as a way of passing psychic pain on to others I, making others also pay for his emotional deficits. Stephens is very aware of this but chooses to keep taking these cases. “ So I am no Lone Ranger riding into town in my white Mercedes-Benz to save the local sheepherders from the cattle barons in black hats. I am clear on that. Moreover, I do not burn myself out with these awful cases because it somehow makes me a better person. No, I admit it, I’m, on a personal vendetta; what the hell, it is obvious. And I don’t need a shrink to tell me what motivates me.”
At the end of the story, Stephens receives a call that is a call he hoped he would never have received. His Zoe has AIDs, and there is nothing he can do to make this better. Stephens talks Zoe into coming to his home to talk, and give her more money, but he has the hopes that she will stay and let her daddy care for her while he still can. Whether Zoe stays, or not this disorder Stephens suffers from will not go away without getting help for himself. He will keep living within the same vicious cycle of being the victim of his own game unless he chooses to break

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