Lust Susan Minot

We all crave at some point in our lives social acceptance. Either we make an unnecessary joke, imitate others, embellish our style, or forwardly lie into a superficial identification. In the short story "Lust" by Susan Minot, the author creates and develops the main character as a girl who is emotionally disconnected and is craving for significance and attention. The author generates her not by her physical assets but rather by her emotions and actions. Susan Minot keeps the main character “unknown” and with no kosher name in order to construct the character. The narrator seeks acceptance and identity but through an unhealthy number of sexual encounters and as the she tries to find herself, she only loses herself into an even deeper sadness

and emptiness.
Susan Minot, at the beginning provides a rather important detail that may have very well shaped and lead the character to feel insignificant. The portrayal of the authority figures in the narrator’s life produces the feeling of an emotional distance. Not only is her family uninvolved, but she too seems to be unbiased in them as well. "Parents never really know what's going on," she tells us. "Especially when you're away at school most of the time". Whenever she would bring a guy home her mother would just comment with “he seems nice” or “I like that one” without much sentiment. While her father would not even bother to speak to them unless they played sports. As the story goes on, we continuously witness how she becomes involved with more than a handful of guys. For a couple of minutes, being with a man made her feel important and wanted and “when, with one attentive finger they tuck the hair behind your ear, you – you do everything they want (Minot, p. 280).” There and then, the narrator found her kryptonite. Minot illustrates faultlessly the mind of a licentious girl. She is compelled to these men for fulfillment and indulgence. But during every single encounter she presents herself as emotionally removed, “then he came back to me” she says, “a body waiting on the rug.” To an extent, she no longer does it for her own satisfaction. Now she does it because she feels as if she has no choice, because she knows she is nothing. The narrator is already presented as nameless and faceless, further influencing the reader in believing that she has already by some means disappeared, just like the men she has had intimate relations with make her fade away into nothing after sex.
Later in the story, she begins to realize that all it really is, is lust. Lust is having a hedonistic and unrestrained feeling towards sex. It’s seductive and powerful but it's intrinsically selfish and hostile to love. Countless girls who consistently have sex with different men tend to have a rapport with the desire to be needed. The characters in "Lust" are written innately to accentuate the disconnection and dysfunction in the environment and intimate life of the people in it, further reflecting the main characters internal conflict. At the beginning of the story, the narrator lacks emotion compared to how the story progresses. Later she begins to have her own opinions and thoughts and realizes she feels more lost and empty than ever before. She feels like an object. A used object. “His eyes looking through my forehead” she tells us “I was ashamed but couldn’t look him in the eye.” Now she actually feels. She acknowledges what she is and what she has done and her lack of self-worth has taken a dramatic toll in her life.
Sex and lust no longer blind her.

The narrator no longer lives in a fog, but now she sees how vile and cruel her life is. How disconnected the people around her are. Minot demonstrates very clearly how boys’ sexual desire completely dominates the narrator and how girls are compelled by other girls as well as boys to accede to that desire. For example, when the narrator was speaking with her teacher and friends her friend complained about how men always want something from you and another friend replied with “you always feel like you have to deliver something.” Their teacher tells the girls “you do” she continues “babies.” This shows how even the adults in her life are disconnected and don’t carry women’s standards highly with respect. The girls always have to give something while the men just take and in this case, the little bit of dignity the character ever owned was taken from her and the saddest part was that she let it happen. The difference between the character at the beginning and how she was made to be in the end is that at the beginning she showed no feelings, no shame, and no remorse but now. Now she feels shame. She feels guilt. In order to get what she wanted she used sex but by using sex, she only reduced her chances of ever feeling real love and real importance. The narrator demonstrates her agony and detachment with post haste only at the very end of the story. The authors writing is connected to how the narrator feels. As her writing style became less fragmented, it signaled the zenith realization of truth within the main character. "After sex, you curl up like a shrimp, something deep inside you ruined, slammed in a place that sickens at slamming, and slowly you fill up with an overwhelming sadness, an elusive gaping worry. You don't try to explain it, filled with the knowledge that it's nothing after all, everything filling up finally and absolutely with death (Minot 280)”. The main character has grasped all of this, but it’s already too late.

She blames herself for any type of rejection she receives, “it’s obviously your own damn fault” she says “you open your legs but can’t, or don’t dare anymore to open your heart (Minot 279)” Although she has reached the ultimate realization, the narrator learned that it’s easier to open your legs than your heart. She has proven to herself that she is just as fragmented and broken as she has always been and will be. She knows it’s wrong but she still does everything they want. After the "briskness of loving" his detachment is something she's known all along because she will always know that “after the briskness of loving, loving stops”. She "seems to have disappeared" (Minot 280).
The gap between the narrator’s true thoughts and her incessant sexual actions become very clear. She knows it’s wrong and she realizes her mistakes but deep inside her she has already found an identity. She already knows that for the rest of her life she will be that girl that has a new boyfriend every week. That girl that will slowly feel like love doesn’t exist. That girl that only wants sex because that’s all she has ever known because it’s all men have given her and that’s all she is letting herself allow to receive because her heart is debarred.