Of all the materials that we have covered in class so far, one short story has stuck with me more than the others. “The Love of My Life,” by T.C Boyle, is a short fiction that revolves around two young lovers. I’ll admit that when I first started to read this short story, I did not expect it to have the ending that it did. Like most of the stories that we have read so far, I figured that this was going to be another story with abortion as a main theme. Although I wasn’t wrong about it being a pregnancy gone wrong themed story, I didn’t expect the ending to be as gruesome as it actually was. What Boyle did was take a recurrent theme, in this case pregnancy, and twist it into something much more disturbing in my opinion. The beginning of the …show more content…
However, Boyle foreshadows heavily in beginning when he states that, “They’d rented a pair of slasher movies for the ritualized comfort of them— ‘Teens have sex,’ he said, ‘and then they pay for it in body parts’”(Boyle, 1). In my interpretation of this scene, Boyle uses this technique of foreshadowing to introduce the concept of sex into the story. As a result of this introduction, readers are able to start interpreting what the main theme of the story is going to be about, which I interpret to be as pregnancy. My interpretation is supported when we, the readers, get to the fourth page of the story to what I consider the “downfall.” In the beginning of the third page, Jeremy and China have planned a trip to the Catskills together that has been in the making for quite some time. Throughout the fourth page, Jeremy and China are enjoying their time at the lake and partaking in promiscuous activities. Boyle implies that Jeremy and China have unprotected sex on their camping trip when he states that, “she had forgotten to pack her pills and he had only two condoms with him” (Boyle, 4). What I find interesting about this whole situation that Jeremy and China put themselves in is the fact that they are both so adamant about not having an unplanned pregnancy in the beginning of the story. Boyle doesn’t hide this fact from us readers, especially when he characterizes China the way he does. …show more content…
Boyle further displays her childlike qualities when she protests Jeremy’s wishes for an abortion and can only respond with, “I can’t” and “I’m scared” (Boyle, 5). Her fear isn’t what deems her as childlike in my eyes, it’s the way she closes herself off and simply ignores the pregnancy. It’s one thing to ignore, for example, a bad grade. The fact that someone could ignore a living thing growing inside of you for nine months is mind boggling. When it is time for the birth of their child, they meet in a motel. Jeremy delivers the baby and China responds with, “Get rid of it. Just get rid of it” (Boyle, 6). I could do nothing but stare at the paper when I read what came out of China’s mouth after the birth of her firstborn child. It is impossible to believe that there was no motherly instinct or attachment found in China. What makes this story so gruesome and disturbing is how nonchalantly China and Jeremy murder their baby. Boyle describes the scene as, “He never gave a thought to what lay discarded in the Dumpster out back, itself wrapped in plastic, so much meat, so much cold meat” (Boyle, 7). This line gave me cold chills becauses it’s very hard to wrap your head around an act like this. How could someone not give even a passing thought on the murder of their firstborn by their own hand? Additionally, after China attempts to cover herself from the law as portraying her story
Prompt #3: “Most often, literary works have both internal conflict (individual v. self) and external conflict (individual v. individual, society, nature, or technology)”.
The adoption process can take more than one year and cost a family up to $18,000. Couples wait anxiously for the government’s approval, then the government assigns them a baby. Couples are given nothing more than a picture of the baby. They don’t have the child’s medical information, who the parents are, etc. Finally, three days after the arrival in Beijing, the couples get to meet their baby for the first time. Under Chairman Mao in the ‘50s and ‘60s, China’s population exploded. By 1980, Mao’s successors limited families to having only one child. Sometimes, families were allowed to have two. This was the largest human population control effort in human history. China’s population is coming under control, but there are consequences no one intended. Couples feel that they must have a boy because boys often carry on the family name, provide work and they stay with their parents at old age. Possibly, over 100,000 baby girls are abandoned every year. Many of them will end up in an orphanage. Today, 1in 4 children adopted overseas come from China. The babies adopted by Americans are only a fraction of the millions of girls believed to be missing from China’s population. While the number of girls are being giving away, the number of boys are becoming way out of proportion. Today, boys greatly out number girls and its only getting worse. This relates to cultural relativism,
...serve it? He still couldn't understand. That thing in the Dumpster--and he refused to call it human, let alone a baby. (622-623)" Jeremy had formed the opinion in his psyche that he had done the right thing by getting rid of his child, he began to make justifications for his action in saying that it was just another unwanted child in an overpopulated world. These rationalizations seem to only give Jeremy and China more reasons to not see what they had done as wrong.
T.C. Boyle uses immorality as a central idea to tell the story. Jeremy tells China to end her pregnancy: ‘“You have to get rid of it…go to a clinic’, he told her” (). Here one sees that Jeremy is not a responsible person.
A New Literacy Age in American Society Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart depicts a futuristic American society dominated by media. Technology is their most precious process, everything revolves around their äppärät. Everyone is ranked based on their attractiveness and wealth. Most people want to stay young and live longer. Any written artifacts are almost non-existent, and literacy is not the same as before.
We all have expectations, something that we expect as a result of something we did, but what about the unexpected something that we did but never fathomed the consequences? We often times call the unexpected a “curve ball” and that’s exactly what happened to the couples in the short essays “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway and “Good People” by David Foster Wallace, they were thrown a curve ball. The couples in the short stories have extremely hard decisions to make. The woman have the most important decision to make and the men have to decide to support the women in the lives or make a decision to move on. Sheri will most likely have her baby because she cancelled the abortion and she has bonded with her baby in her womb, and Lane Dean Jr. will marry her because he realizes he loves her. On the other hand Jig will most likely have the abortion because she fears the American will leave her if she doesn’t, and the American will stay with her because now they can travel without a baby spoiling his plans.
Ninety percent of Americans marry by the time that they are fifty; however, forty to fifty percent of marriages end in divorce ("Marriage and Divorce"). Love and marriage are said to go hand in hand, so why does true love not persist? True, whole-hearted, and long-lasting love is as difficult to find as a black cat in a coal cellar. Loveless marriages are more common than ever, and the divorce rate reflects this. The forms of love seen between these many marriages is often fleeting. Raymond Carver explores these many forms of love, how they create happiness, sadness, and anything in between, and how they contrast from true love, through his characters in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love". Four couples are presented: Mel and Terri, Nick and Laura, Ed and Terri, and, most importantly, an unnamed elderly couple; each couple exhibits a variation on the word love.
Has there ever been a time where you have experienced true love, but everything was not what you expected? You thought everything was at the forefront but there was a deeper meaning to things. Well in the poem “First Love: A Quiz”, A.E. Stallings introduces you to the deeper side of things. This poem doesn’t consist of many literary devices, but Stallings uses her choice of words to make the reader give thought to the text, and to the story being told of Persephone and Hades. The structure of the poem also helps to better understand the actual meaning of the poem. As you read this “quiz” everything gets very abstract and your options become harder and harder to choose from.
Robert Nozick’s Love’s Bond is a clear summary of components, goals, challenges, and limitations of romantic love. Nozick gives a description of love as having your wellbeing linked with that of someone and something you love. I agree with ideas that Nozick has explained concerning the definition of love, but individuals have their meaning of love. Every individual has a remarkable thing that will bring happiness and contentment in their lives. While sometimes it is hard to practice unconditional love, couples should love unconditionally because it is a true love that is more than infatuation and overcomes minor character flaw.
Kingston’s mother takes many different approaches to reach out to her daughter and explain how important it is to remain abstinent. First, she tells the story of the “No Name Woman”, who is Maxine’s forgotten aunt, “’ Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her can happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born”’ (5), said Maxine’s mother. Kingston’s aunt was murdered for being involved in this situation. The shame of what Kingston’s aunt brought to the family led them to forget about her. This particular talk-story is a cautionary tale to deter Kingston from having premarital sex and to instill in her fear of death and humiliation if she violates the lesson her mother explained to her. Kingston is able to get pregnant but with the lecture her mother advises her with keeps her obedient. Brave Orchid tells her this story to open her eyes to the ways of Chinese culture. The entire family is affected by one’s actions. She says, “‘Don’t humiliate us’” (5) because the whole village knew about the pregnant aunt and ravaged the family’s land and home because of it. Maxine tries asking her mother in-depth questions about this situation, but her m...
Although she got pregnant by someone other than her husband they did not look at the good and joyful moments the child could bring. Having a baby can be stressful, especially being that the village was not doing so great. The baby could have brought guilt, anger, depression, and loneliness to the aunt, family, and village lifestyle because having a baby from someone other than your husband was a disgrace to the village, based on the orientalism of women. Society expected the women to do certain things in the village and to behave a particular way. The author suggests that if her aunt got raped and the rapist was not different from her husband by exploiting "The other man was not, after all, much different from her husband. They both gave orders; she followed. ‘If you tell your family, I 'll beat you. I 'll kill you. Be, here again, next week." In her first version of the story, she says her aunt was a rape victim because "women in the old China did not choose with who they had sex with." She vilifies not only the rapist but all the village men because, she asserts, they victimized women as a rule. The Chinese culture erred the aunt because of her keeping silent, but her fear had to constant and inescapable. This made matters worse because the village was very small and the rapist could have been someone who the aunt dealt with on a daily basis. Maxine suggests that "he may have been a vendor
Love has been the cause of some of the greatest feats, discoveries, and battles in the history of man. It has driven men to insanity and despair, while it has lead others to happiness and bliss. This idea that love has a strong influence on man’s decisions can be seen in the poem, “Love is not all” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The most prominent theme presented in “Love is not all” is that although love is not a necessity of life, it somehow manages to provoke such great desire and happiness that it becomes important.
The policed came to his dorm room and arrested Jeremy. At first being completely oblivious, then realizing what he done the night before. If their lives weren’t ruined before, it was ruined now. China went to a women’s correctional facility while Jeremy went to jail. He wasn’t the same after that. He’d lost everything. He lost his smile, walk and his muscles. He was no longer in college. Worse, his presumably girlfriend betrayed him. This betrayal caused a lot of pain and suffering in Jeremy. He couldn’t breathe. His seemingly love of his life betrayed him so she could save her own
There are many positive things and negative things about the movie and the story. In the movie
“Love is universally accepted by many people and the concept of love within the English language refers to a variety of different approaches, states and attitudes, ranging from pleasure to interpersonal attraction.” (Kendrick 123) My characterization of love encourages the intimate emotion I partake for my family. The distinct connection that we fashioned and the invaluable moments that we consolidated. In the perceptive of a mother, my children are my supremacy and the greatest blessing of my lifecycle. They’re my inspiration and motivation to continue progressing and becoming the best at what I do. With that in mind, Love relics your outlooks and approaches the linkage they become associated with. Consequently, this condition can fluctuate over a period of a specific time. Additionally, depending on your situation, your perspective on love can be an altering affect, creating a stable or inconsistent assessment. Furthermore, causing your love to intensify, decline, or even cease. Love in its essence, stands justly powerful and the beauty of it advances,