"How to Talk to a Hunter" by Pam Houston

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In "How to Talk to a Hunter" by Pam Houston, the hunter is portrayed as a liar, cheater, and unwilling to commit to any type of relationship. In my opinion, he is misunderstood and degraded because of his psychological issue of reluctance to commit to a monogamous relationship. His reluctance to commit is often overshadowed by the narrorator's views and large distrust issue.

Foremost, we need to examine the hunter from his psychological progression from his past. In the story, his views are often overshadowed by the narrater or by our learned emotion to see the story as a picture. He states that he has emotional baggage from a previous relationship (Houston, MLM, 805) and tries to explain how much she hurt him. That would bring any of us to a point of building a sort of emotional wall. From this the narrorater begins to build a sort of case against him with her friends instead of looking and progressing him past that point of rejection from his past girlfriend.

Secondly, he starts to show emotion towards her before the subject of commitment is ever brought into the story. The junter says one night while drunk that he was "sorry for taking that deer, that every now and then there's an animal that isn't meant to be taken...." This was a sort of metaphor that shows he may have thought things were moving to fast and that he didn't mean to trap her, partly setting her up for the pain that was to come later. I believe that he was using this example to say that he was sorry for finding her because he knew it would hurt her when she found out he wasn't ready to move to commitment.

Finally, he tells her "it doesn't feel right hugging anyone else (Houston, MLM, 807)." When he says this, he is overshadowed by the hostile feelings of the thoughts of her friend. In addition, he is totally disregarded as a liar or just being in the relationship for sex. From the beginning, in not so many words, he tried to get some time to consider their relationship.

In conclusion, with these examples I believe this shows he was not such a bad guy, maybe a little confused, but not to be considered a hunter. He made many mistakes by cheating on her, but she should have recognized his need for time from the relationship because of the mentioning of the lingering pain from his last girlfriend.

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