Regret In Edward J. Delaney's Clean

Regret is defined as the feeling of sadness, repentance, or disappointment over something that has happened or been done, and it is one of the most prevalent and reoccuring emotions in daily life. Anne Frank captured the power of regret best when she stated, "Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude." Consequently, because regret is such a strong emotion, it can become an emotional burden that drastically hinders one's life if one allows it. This event is quite evident in the short story "Clean" by Edward J. Delaney. The main character commits murder in a fit of drunken rage but suffers from regret for the remainder of his life. Similarly, while First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross in Tim

Delaney's short story "Clean" is a prime and quite detailed example of how deep the repercussions of regret truly run. Foremost, because "Clean" is written in second person instead of third person, the rash actions of the main character become reality for the readers as they begin to question their own actions. For example, the story begins with the mysterious and piercing line, "You think of that night endlessly from your imprisonment, the decisions made, the chain of mistakes (Delaney 1110)." It goes on to recount how the night began with "your two buddies, a fifth of cheap vodka, and half a gallon of orange juice" that caused the main character to confront a fellow classmate named Barry in a drunken rage over a mutually liked girl (Delaney 1110). However, this confrontation would end quite tragically because "you'd picked up a rock, and you'd swung it at his head," and when "a minute later he was on the ground, dead," "you instantly sobered (Delaney 1110)." While the friends rapidly decide on the proper way to dispose of the evidence and body to prevent their imprisonment, the emotional burden of regret has already led to their own mental imprisonment, especially that of the main character. Thus, he remembers "That was '72. You think of forty years gone past, and the girl. For days after, you did the calculus, of risk and probability (Delaney 1111), yet the depth of the situation never seemed to hit him until college. "Those were the years when you

Although, specifically, the difference between guilt and remorse is that “remorse is experienced when the guilt about the hostile wishes was insufficient to prevent acting," remorse is a sufficient part of preventing an event from recurring and changing one's life in the future (Marriot 9). Nonetheless, there are some individuals that never seem to experience this emotion in any sense. For example, Darren, a child that grew up in a rather difficult environment, was prosecuted for the accidental murder of another child, but because he had such a difficult childhood and such, the child seemingly had no remorse for the act. Because he was put through therapy, Darren later stated that "reparation is only possible if the pain of guilt and remorse about harm done can be tolerated (Marriott 5)." One can never heal if they cannot first learn to experience regret and later learn to tolerate and overcome that regret. There must be a proper balance because being overwhelmed by regret is just as negative as never feeling any remorse at all. However, the problem is that "Emotions have long shed the stigma of being a sort of line noise, something that interferes with proper operation of our minds," so research has found that there is "a high degree of specificity in the correspondence