This critique is for Anne-Isabelle de Bokay’s short story titled “Remembrance,” which showcases the crippling effects of guilt and resentment, of what can happen when the weight of loss lingers. “Remembrance” opens with a husband, Samuel, shortly after he finished burying an item of his deceased daughter. His wife, Mariette, calls him inside for their daily routine: she seats him, feeds him, and puts him to bed. The events that led up to Linne’s (their daughter) death are revealed: Samuel’s command to climb the tree caused her to fall and later die, and Mariette’s shock prevented her from calling for help. The usual state of things breaks as Samuel speaks his mind, blaming Mariette and convincing her that she killed their daughter. In the …show more content…
end, the roles of caretaker and patient are reversed as Samuel gains control over his emotionally paralyzed wife. The story shifts perspectives, beginning with Samuel and transitioning into Mariette. Samuel’s internal monologue is kept from the reader, and instead, we get a sense of his inability to properly function.
He does not speak for most of the story, indicating an obvious trauma resulting from his daughter’s death. There are early indications of his resentment toward his wife, particularly in the beginning paragraph when he sighs, probably annoyed, when being summoned back to the house. The author puts more focus on Mariette’s thoughts after she puts her husband to bed. She suffers from a recurring nightmare about Linne’s death that keeps her from sleeping. Linne’s death scene introduces three characters, her brothers, who are not mentioned again in the present, a loose end in the plot. Their relevance to the story is merely a contrast to Linne; while they are active and praised by Samuel, Linne is weaker and deprived from her father’s attention. This contrast reveals Mariette’s resentment toward her husband, whose expectations Linne was trying to meet when she fell to her eventual death. However, she does not explicitly discuss her feelings about her husband or his lack of speaking, as she did in the previous version. This could be a hindrance to the story, since it leaves the reader wondering about the full picture of their lives before
Samuel confronts her. This scene is perhaps the most emotionally harrowing of the story, making the mood much more overtly aggressive as Samuel’s former self returns. The breaking of the necklace is a very effective metaphor for the break of their usual cyclic routine; Samuel has finished his burying “project” and now the roles are reversed. His emotional abuse of Mariette eventually drives her to the same state of crippling shock that he was previously in, as the weight of self-blame for Linne’s death is passed on from Samuel to her. The last scene shifts the focus of the story outward to a bigger picture: Linne’s belongings decompose, symbolic of her body and her past with the family, and all that remains is mud, death, nothingness. It forces the reader to take a step back and consider the big picture, the reality of loss and death culminating to nothing.
Is it better to be loved alive or dead? In The Best American Essays edited by Lauren Slater, Toi Derricotte writes an exquisite short story “Beginning Dialogues” about the love for her dead mother, a love that was never there while her mother was living. The loss of her mother was not a poignant moment for her as she confesses, “I truly do not miss her like that, do not feel that irreversible moment of no return” (49). She navigates us through the stringent power her mother had over her as a child leaving us to wonder if when we feel love is as paramount as the feeling of love itself. Derricotte’s short story exhibits her sumptuous prose with vivid descriptions of her ambiance, her calamitous childhood moments, and her captivating ending.
In her article, Quindlen delivers her position to the massive mixed audience of the New York Times, drawing in readers with an emotional and humanizing lure; opening up about her family life and the deaths she endured. Later presenting the loss of her brother's wife and motherless children, Quindlen use this moment to start the engine of her position. Quindlen uses her experiences coupled with other authority figures, such as, the poet Emily Dickenson, Sherwin Nuland, doctor and professor from Yale, author Hope Edelman, and the President. These testimonies all connect to the lasting effects of death on the living, grief. She comes full circle, returning to her recently deceased sister-in-law; begging t...
Memory is both a blessing and a curse; it serves as a reminder of everything, and its meaning is based upon interpretation. In Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies Dedé lives through the memory of her family and her past. She tells the stories of her and her sisters lives leading up to their deaths, and reflects upon those memories throughout her daily life. Dedé lives on for her sisters, without her sisters, but all along carrying them with her throughout her life, never moving on. Dedé lives with the shame, sadness, and regret of all that has happened to her sisters, her marriage, and her family. Dedé’s memories serve as a blessing in her eyes, but are a burden
In ‘The Turning’, mostly set in Angelus, some characters have never left the town while others return to the city to try to make sense of their lives and heal their wounds. All characters find disappointment or confirmation that they will never escape from their point of origin and that the painful experiences of childhood and adolescence isolate them in a phony reality. The short-story collection emphasises the idea that suffering is a pervasive part of the human condition and that moments of contentment are few, since life is an ongoing struggle, it also emphasises that the past shapes who you are. In the story 'Abbreviation', Melanie's comment that 'all the big things hurt, the things you remember. If it doesn't hurt it's not important'
The interpretations of what comes after death may vary greatly across literature, but one component remains constant: there will always be movement. In her collection Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey discusses the significance, permanence and meaning of death often. The topic is intimate and personal in her life, and inescapable in the general human experience. Part I of Native Guard hosts many of the most personal poems in the collection, and those very closely related to the death of Trethewey’s mother, and the exit of her mother’s presence from her life. In “Graveyard Blues”, Trethewey examines the definition of “home” as a place of lament, in contrast to the comforting meaning in the epitaph beginning Part I, and the significance
Written by Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter tells a story filled with secrets, lies, and heartwarming love—secrets that would tear relationships apart and form unbreakable walls, but also secrets that would allow a tremendous abundance of love to build in unexpected places. Set over a span of twenty-five years, the novel explores many different characters and their true colors, some more surprising than you think, in order to portray the complex story.
Marie's place in the royal household of France and Franco-Austrian relations absolutely depended on her producing a male heir, even before her husband became the King of France. Lever went into great detail the frustrations both Louis XVI and Marie dealt within her marriage. It took the prince a very long time to become comfortable with Marie and Marie just wanted to party and have fun. This story was written as a love story between the two because by the end of their lives, they were both respected and loved each other like a husband and wife should.
In Amy Hempels’ Short Story “Going,” our journey with the narrator travels through loss, coping, memory, experience, and the duality of life. Throughout the story is the narrator’s struggle to cope with the passing of his mother, and how he transitions from a mixture of depression, denial, and anger, into a kind of acceptance and revelation. The narrator has lost his mother in a fire three states away, and proceeds on a reckless journey through the desert, when he crashes his car and finds himself hospitalized. Only his thoughts and the occasional nurse to keep him company. The narrator soon gains a level of discovery and realizations that lead to a higher understanding of the duality of life and death, and all of the experiences that come with being alive.
The nameless narrator of the novella marries her cousin, Daniel whose first wife died a year earlier. The two marry less out of love, and more out of necessity. Indeed, the narrator becomes so disillusioned with the marriage, and so keenly aware of the aura of death, also represented by the fog, which surrounds the house, that she constantly looks for ways to escape. She often goes into the woods, to bathe or commune with nature. Then, one night while they are in the city to pick up Daniel’s mother to come back to the house with them, she takes a walk where she encounters her lover. After consummating their love, the narrator returns home to Daniel and she, Daniel, and his mother go back to the house in the country. Here, the narrator is totally preoccupied with her lover. She thinks about him, writes about him, and seeks him constantly, until Daniel reveals to her that he never let her go for a walk that night in the city. The narrator returns to the city because Regina, Daniel’s sister, is in the hospital for attempting suicide while with her illicit lover. The narrator looks for the house where she and her lover slept together and cannot find it. By the end of the novel, she realizes that her ideal lover, is only imagined, and Daniel stops her from committing suicide. As a result, the narrator becomes resigned...
This idea of memories being forgotten is when there is a mention of graves being lost in “Elegy for the Native Guard”. This is further reinforced in the line “All the grave markers, all the crude headstones – water-lost.” (44) While the poem does allude to the fact that these graves were destroyed due to natural causes, that of a hurricane, it is still significant. This poem demonstrates that society’s memory is not permanent, it can and will be lost
“I still recall… going into the large, darkened parlor to see my brother and finding the casket, mirrors and pictures all draped in white, and my father seated by his side, pale and immovable. As he took no notice of me, after standing a long while, I climbed upon his knee, when he mechanically put his arm about me and with my head resting against his beating heart we both sat in silence, he thinking of the wreck of all his hopes in the loss of a dear son, and I wondered what could be said or done to fill the void in his breast. At length, he heaved a deep sign and said: “Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a
Through an intimate maternal bond, Michaels mother experiences the consequences of Michaels decisions, weakening her to a debilitating state of grief. “Once he belonged to me”; “He was ours,” the repetition of these inclusive statements indicates her fulfilment from protecting her son and inability to find value in life without him. Through the cyclical narrative structure, it is evident that the loss and grief felt by the mother is continual and indeterminable. Dawson reveals death can bring out weakness and anger in self and with others. The use of words with negative connotations towards the end of the story, “Lonely,” “cold,” “dead,” enforce the mother’s grief and regressing nature. Thus, people who find contentment through others, cannot find fulfilment without the presence of that individual.
The Warmest December is a story of a young girl and her family as they move through an abusive past with an alcoholic man. Kenzie struggles through childhood only to find that she has started to become her father, Hy-Lo. She visits him daily and relives painful moments from her past at his bedside. The book is filled with difficult accounts of her physical and emotional abuse as she grows up. This paper will discuss the topics of recovery and forgiveness after a troubled past as it pertains to both The Warmest December and other books we have read, specifically Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Dandicat.
This recreative writing piece has been inserted at the end of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ where the last line reads, “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain”. I have chosen to continue writing after the end of the novel to show the impact that Catherines death has had on Frederic Henry. Despite Frederic appearing to be in control, it is clear that her death has affected him, leaving him extremely detached and isolated. I have kept my piece in a retrospective narrative like Hemingway. Though the use of past tense, a confessional narrative is established as Frederic is reliving the events through prose in an attempt to forget his past, suggested by the title. The use of a retrospective narrative also presents the idea that the narrative voice is following a pre planned story that the Frederic at the time is not in control of, creating a sense of inevitability and foreboding throughout the whole novel.
Katherine Philips is desperately trying to renew her faith in life, but she is struggling to do so because of the death of her son. She is attempting to justify the loss of her child as a form of consolation, while keeping somewhat emotionally detached to the later death of her stepson in “In Memory of F.P.” The differing phrases, words, and language contrast the two elegies and emphasize the loss and pain in “Epitaph” while diminishing the pain in “Memory of FP.”