Identity In Lena Coakley's Mirror Image

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Lena Coakley’s science fiction short story, “Mirror Image”, depicts a teenage girl, Alice, and her family’s life after Alice becomes the first ever person to successively receive a brain transplant, where they remove her brain and place it into a body similar in age and gender. As Alice is adjusting to her new body, she also has to accustom to her Mom and her once identical twin sister’s view of her identity; is she Alice, or the teenage girl who donated her body to science when she passed away, Gail Jarred, with Alice’s memories? Alice begins to doubt who she is too, but grips to the fact that her brain is her’s.

The idea of “Mirror Image” is an intriguing one. Not only is Alice struggling with her identity, but so is her family and the media. My piece, …show more content…

“Those Jarreds...if we start having reporters all over the lawn again...” (4). While the obvious play of ethics is stated I began to think about it. What stood out to me was the detachment people, medical professionals in particular, can hold towards their patients because of human curiosity. Medical professionals occasionally need to detach that the patient is a person with a life to logically deal with their case. In doing this, human curiosity becomes a primal factor of how they respond to their patients. Patients may start to believe people view them as something to wonder at, or broken because of the physical treatment they received, and some people will. In “Mirror Image” the media becomes transfixed on the girl who has a new body. The medical procedure Alice went through will start becoming affiliated to her name. While the brain transplant will for sure affect her identity, it's also a possibility she will enable it to consume and define who she is. These perceptions I had from “Mirror Image” caused me to create my drawing to illustrate how people can have prejudice to others because of their medical

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