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

O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" is seemingly consumed by a deep and distracting yet unreturned love, one of the soldiers in his platoon loses his life leading to him being burdened with regret. These two emotion driven characters cause a life to be lost due to their unreasonable actions, and they then become emotionally bound by the chains of regret.

Edward J.

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

needed to tell yourself what you were, and what you were not. So: You were a good person. You were not violent (Delaney 1112)." Nonetheless, these tactics never seemed to work because he became gripped by "unbidden memories" and "predawn panics" out of fear that his deepest and darkest secret would quite literally be uncovered (Delaney 1112). Time would continue to pass, and even though the main character was still imprisoned by the memories and subsequent regret of that night, life, including his marriage and business, would become "something mellow and a bit more distant (Delaney 1112)." Yet, underneath the facade, he would become an "insomniac" that "played that one minute of your life in an endless loop on the pale wall of your skull" because he felt his "unmasking was imminent (Delaney 1112)." Although he felt this way much of the time, they say that time has a way of erasing all mistakes, so years later, the main character has seemingly erased almost every trace of evidence and all witnesses when his best friend Dennis dies without confessing. However, he suddenly finds that his wife had an affair because he had become "a dull, passionless person" with "no fire” as a result of being consumed with concealing his awful past (Delaney 1113). The main character had let this fear and regret of the past consume him. He may have felt that the future seemed "orderly, calm," but the truth of the matter was "The irony of getting away with something was that you were your own keeper. You were the executioner: in a pang of remorse, you could just open your mouth and change your life (Delaney 1114-1115)." In fact, his soul would never be clean and he would never live free of the regret until he confessed the truth to Jesus Christ.

Similarly, Tim O'Brien's short story "The Things They Carried" finds First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross in a position of loss and regret. As the commander of a platoon "humping," which means "to walk or to march," across Vietnam during the Vietnam War, there was no room for emotional burdens like regret because that quickly led to unalterable error (O'Brien 1518). Nevertheless, Cross has become consumed with his love for a girl back home named Martha: "More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her (O'Brien 1516)." Furthermore, Cross so desperately desired Martha's love that he could not get her out of his head, so he "carried two photographs of Martha" "both signed Love (O'Brien 1518)." While Cross was so sure that he was in love, the truth of the matter was that it was lust: "Whenever he looked at the photographs, he thought of new things he should've done (O'Brien 1519)." Time passes, and Martha sends him a pebble from the beaches of New Jersey "as a token of her truest feelings for him (O'Brien 1520)." Consequently, Cross becomes so dangerously distracted that "His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war (O'Brien 1521)." No matter what their mission was Martha was always on his mind instead of the dire task at hand. Thus, even though he was suppose to be watching a tunnel for signs of the enemy, "He was not there. He was buried with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey shore (O'Brien 1522)." It was at that moment, due to his intense distraction and loose leadership, that "Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing (O'Brien 1522). Meanwhile, the chopper may have taken Lavender's body away, but "He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men (O'Brien 1525)." "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight (O'Brien 1527)." Thus, Cross overwhelmed with the guilt and remorse of Lavender’s death burns all of Martha's letters and pictures because Martha did not by any means return his love. Although "Lavender was dead. You couldn't burn the blame," Cross decided to change the situation for the better (O'Brien 1528). He would channel his regret into a different type of energy. "No more fantasies, he told himself...He would not tolerate laxity. He would show strength, distancing himself (O'Brien 1529)."

Specifically, studies find regret or remorse, which is defined as "a re-biting of experience following a doing that cannot be undone," to be a prominent part of many mistakes in life (Marriott 9).

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

between emotion and behavior (Blunden 2)." Sadly, emotions are found to be highly linked to actions, especially anger and frustration and fear, because "It takes anger to elicit antagonistic actions, and fear to prompt avoidant acts (Blunden 2)." After these actions take place, though, many find themselves left with a burden of remorse larger than they could possibly bear on their own. O'Brien stated, "I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief," and his stories are about "accepting indeterminacy and learning to live not through Vietnam but with it (Chen)." Simply, even though emotions are linked to these disastrous events that happen in daily life, one can never overcome the subsequent emotions of grief and remorse without accepting the events as part of the unalterable past. This healing then begins with telling the truth as evidenced in "The Things They Carried" even though "the truth is ugly" and the looming threat of "exile is simple in its execution, chilling in its consequences (Chen)." No matter how dire the consequences and repercussions of telling the truth one must accept that this is the first step in the healing process because to harbor the awful reality is to imprison oneself. Nonetheless, one should never allow it to control their life to the point that it binds them as an emotional burden, but always remember the event enough to never repeat the offense.

In short, both "Clean" and "The Things They Carried" focus on the regret a person

faces after committing a specific act. This regret then becomes tangible and is carried around as an emotional burden. Yet, that truly becomes a problem when it begins to affect their life and the lives of those around them, so oftentimes, the best therapy is to accept the regret as part of the past. Always remember the negative emotions enough to never repeat the event. Just never allow it to control the present life and imprison the mind like the main character of "Clean."