“…one could not be certain witness to anything: Miriam, so vividly there – and yet, where was she? Where, where?” In the fictional short story Miriam by Truman Capote, Miriam is a queer, mysterious little girl who haunts Mrs. H. T. Miller, a widow who lives alone and isolated in an apartment. Throughout the short story, Miriam remains strange and mysterious, and the story ends inconclusively, with the question “who is Miriam?” unanswered. But through evidence found throughout the text, readers are able to speculate who, or what, Miriam is. From my perspective and the evidence gathered, I believe Miriam is a supernatural being; a mischievous Angel of Death who likes to ‘play’ with her victims for a while before she takes them away to the realm of Death.
All the descriptions of Miriam given in the story implies that Miriam is strange and abnormal, and no one but Mrs. Miller can see her; this suggests that either Miriam is in Mrs. Miller’s imagination, and she is fooling herself, or Miriam is a supernatural being and can choose who gets to see her and who can’t. The second one is more supportable, for if Miriam is indeed Mrs. Miller’s imagination, then the question is, why appear now? Mrs. Miller had an organized routine in her life, and was content with it. There is no reason for her to suddenly start imagining Miriam. In the story Miriam is portrayed as a very queer, almost supernatural character, as Miriam’s “hair was the longest and strangest Mrs. Miller had ever seen: absolutely silver-white, like an albino’s. It flowed waist-length in smooth, loose lines. She was thin and fragilely constructed. There was a simple, special elegance in the way she stood…”. Also, in the daylight, “she looked pinched and drawn, her hai...
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...ople to their death is by going to live with them and slowly make them go insane, or watch them die.
Miriam’s presence, or the presence of the Angel of Death, makes Mrs. Miller more aware of her isolated lifestyle, and helps her understand how much of life she had missed. But now it is too late for Mrs. Miller, as Miriam has come to take her away to the realm of Death. Why Mrs. Miller had to die, no one can be sure. The story helps us know that although some privacy and isolation is fine, complete isolation is no good. People completely isolated like that will live a sad life, and perhaps realize a little too late what they have missed out on, and regret it until they die. In conclusion, people should try to recognize their problems fairly quickly and try to fix it, before it is too late and death takes them away.
Works Cited
Miriam, by Truman Capote
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what they feel morally justified to do. The moral aspects of killing a person would be the
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they will die if they perform a certain act, they will be unwilling to perform
As I interviewed Annie Filban about her personal experience with spirits, I found to my judgment that it seemed she based a lot of her belief in her story upon faith. Even though she believed something was in fact out of the norm, and was making peculiar movements and noise in her home, she was still skeptical with some of her statements. Filban responded on different occasions to “I don’t know” and “I guess,” which lead me to believe her belief is not based upon evidence as much as it relies on her faith.
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... authors conclude that it is through alienation within a small society that ultimately leads to the primary characters’ demise and death. Whether their individual cases are self imposed or externally imposed, the results and the impact are the same, annihilation of the human soul. Their craft make emphatic use of setting to the successful depiction of this theme. Both characters ultimately fall into the abyss of loneliness and despair proving that human existence cut-off and on its own is more destructive than positive . Thus their message seems to suggest that as humans, we need society in order to truly belong and have a connection, purpose and worth in this life, in order to truly live.
to a request from that person. Involuntary Euthanasia is used to describe the killing of a person
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