Character Analysis Of Lust By Susan Minot

A teenage girl, away at boarding school, decides to experiment with her sexuality. Popular among the boys, she soon finds herself in many unrestrictive, lust-filled sexual encounters. The conflict of the story emerges with her inability to find emotional fulfillment in her promiscuous affairs. Further, she is unable to reconcile her distorted belief that females are obliged to physically satisfy males against the empty and hallow feeling her profligate lifestyle creates within her. As a result, the teenager, along with many of her female peers, feel depressed and desolate. The narrator is the chief character of Lust. The nameless narrator is young, opinionated, and bold. Her immature ideas of the expectations of her gender towards

Her mother died in a collision with a train due to a malfunction of the train signals. Losing her mother, in the bloom of a women’s sexuality, would have influenced Minot’s writings. Similar to what Minot could have been feeling at the time, the young girl in Lust felt disconnected from her parents and was left to her own devices to seek comfort and understanding through her sexual explorations. Her father was a banker and stockbroker, which may have contributed to the knowledge Minot has of the affluent world her main character in Lust revolves in. Interestingly, Minot’s siblings, three sisters and three brothers, are all artists in their own rights: painter, photographer, artists and writers. Minot studied painting and writing at Brown University; Minot’s creative abilities seems to be a family trait. Notably, Minot married at the late age of thirty-three and again at forty-four. Both marriages ended in divorce. A daughter resulted from her second marriage, Minot was forty-five. Lust was published in 1989, when Minot was thirty-three-years-old. Minot’s ventures into committed relationships at a more mature age, conveys the impression she may have struggled with connections early in life. If that is the case, this definitely would have influenced her