A Surprising Support of Marriage

Interpreter of Maladies presents a fascinating view of marriage. Throughout the novel, we read of marriages plagued by frustration and dishonesty. It would seem logical to assume that this collection takes a position against marriage. Yet the only thing that seems to work out worse than marriage is being unmarried.

This can be clearly seen in the story “Sexy”, which tells the story of an affair between the unwedded Miranda and the married Dev. Early in the story, we hear about the disaster that marriage can be from her friend Laxmi, who tells the story of her cousin's husband having an affair. Then ironically, the relationship between Miranda and Dev starts. At the beginning, this works out for Miranda as she gets to be with this charming and “sexy” man. However, things start to go poorly for her, as she is significantly more interested in him than he is in her. Eventually, she breaks it off, feeling disgusted with the whole thing and regretful that it ever happened. Intriguingly, things work great for Dev, as he gets to both be with Miranda, and at the end still gets to be with his wife. So, it's basically a win-win for him and amazingly seems to indicate that it's better to be the married one in an affair.

The value of marriage is seen again in “A Real Durwan”. Boori Ma, as a result of no longer being married, is forced to work as a pseudo-durwan for the married families in the apartment. This works for a while, but in the end, she ends up being kicked out to the streets. This was a result of her roamings, which were a result of her loneliness. Clearly, the unmarried life doesn’t work out for her.

The craziest support of marriage though comes in the story of Bibi Haldar. She is afflicted with a mysterious illness, which unbeknownst to modern medicine and the majority of homeopathy practitioners, can only be cured by marriage (or almost marriage). After nearly a decade of illness, she is cured by raising a kid. While that wasn’t the marriage that was supposed to cure her, it was the result of her seeking a marriage and what appears to be the villainous actions of an unknown man. Yet, somehow this cures as she now has someone to look after. Overall, I found Interpreter of Maladies support of marriage to be unexpected and quite interesting. Although, some of the anecdotes that are pro-marriage seem to be so ridiculous that they might just be sarcastic. What do you think?

Quality Short Stories Make Poor How-To's

The story “How to Date A Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” took me right back to "Self-Help". This is most likely caused by the fact that they are both instructional guides and they both aren’t very good at it. The best example of this is the way they both assume the person reading it is in their exact situation. Take for example the first story in Self-Help, the narrator keeps giving her dialogue as commands, as if you are there. However, the lines she commands you to say are only helpful if you are in that exact situation. For example, I find it unlikely that anyone is going to be on their first affair, and when someone asks about the weather the correct response will then be to say: “It is fit for neither beast or vegetable.” Junot Diaz’s writing also shows excessive specificity. This is most obvious when the narrator is discussing the different neighborhoods, he just assumes that: everyone knows about the inter-neighborhood dynamics of the Terrace, that our locales are similar, and that we have the same neighborhood-based struggles. Yet, I doubt any parent would be scared about bringing their daughter to Savoy. There is also that whole thing about government cheese, which is just absurdly specific for an instructional guide.

There is, however, one difference between the two stories that makes Diaz at least semi-practical, the significance of these How-To’s. Lorrie Moore covered dramatic topics like having an affair, devoting your life to becoming a writer, and handling a divorce while still a child. On the other hand, Diaz gives an instruction guide on how to date as a poor high school student, whose greatest life ambition appears to be getting laid. Now his life may be more complex than that but “How to Date a Browngirl...” definitely covered a simpler topic than those in Self-Help. However, if anything, I think that made Diaz’s story a better instructional guide since people might have more chances to use it, even if it was still quite specific.  

Also relating to the quality of Junot Diaz as a self-help writer, was his narration of his story. When we watched it in class we discussed how his voice seemed strangely robotic. It was also interesting how seemingly everyone had imagined the narrator having a voice that was anything but robotic. I think that Diaz was trying to emphasize that this story was really an instruction list by removing all the emotion from it, while we had imagined it as more of a conventional short story. In my opinion, his style did succeed in making this short story a How-To guide, but he did it at the consequence of making it an interesting story. Which, to me, proves that a great short story can’t be a great how-to guide. What do you think, can a quality short story make an effective manual for something?

A History of Heart Technology

The history of artificial hearts serves as a backdrop to the story How to Talk to Your Mother. At first they appear to be just factoids that provide temporal context, which is especially important in this story, due to its lack of chronological order. Yet, more importantly, they serve to detail the emotional life of the main character.

This is first seen chronologically, in 1958, when her cousin asks about his uncle: “Did Uncle Will have a hard attack?” In 1959, we then see her at her father’s funeral. Combining these, it can be deduced that her father passed away from heart conditions. This serves as the basis for the heart theme. She has lost the primary male figure in her life and spends the rest of her life trying to find a new one, just as technology seeks to replace the heart.

In 1963, the temporary artificial heart is invented and she breaks up with the man she thought she would spend her life with. Here the man in her life is only able to heal her momentarily, she breaks up with him before the year’s end, just as the artificial heart is only good for a few hours. Four years later, “The first successful heart transplant is performed in South Africa” and her mother moves in with her. The heart details here shows how the mother is replacing the role her father played and supporting her emotionally. However, heart implants only last for a couple years and her mother will only be able to help the narrator’s mental health for a couple years, before her own mental health fades.

It is then many years until we hear the last snippet about cardiac technology, until 1982 (The first paragraph) when “The first polyurethane heart is surgically implanted". Going with the heart theme, this implies that she has found a “permanent” solution to the emotional damage her father’s heart attack caused years ago.  This is reinforced as she hears the person above her playing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, an indication by the author that the protagonist has finally something or someone that will fill the void. Although the story suggests that she is still struggling mentally and leaves me wondering if this heart technology will be ephemeral as all the previous solutions.

Not Just Black and White

“This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” shows an interesting portrayal of race. The primary idea behind it is that it is not just black and white and I mean this quite literally. This story presents the idea that there are many different groups that are discriminated against. This idea that was previously explored in “Previous Condition”, in which Peter’s Jewish friend Jules, attempts to sympathize with Peter’s anguish by explaining that he has also been discriminated against for being Jewish.

This idea is shown through the Narrator’s Tunisian friend Boona. He is accused of stealing money from Ada by Pete, while they are at the nightclub. We are led to believe that this is true based on several people’s reports. However, Boona says otherwise and claims: “I think it is that Frenchman who say I am a thief. They think we are all thieves” (190). Clearly, he is insinuating that they are accusing him merely because he is Tunisian. Weather or not he did steal the money, it is very possible that this is true. Earlier, it was pointed out that he is unable to got out with French or White girls because he is Arab, so clearly it is common for him to be discriminated against. Intriguingly, this a dynamic that we have seen before, and if taken out of context, one could easily assume that it was between a white man and an African-American.

There are many parallels between the racism that the narrator receives in America and the ones that Boona is subjected to here. The most interesting one though, revolves around the use of the word “boy”. When the narrator gets off the boat in America, he is annoyed that he is being called a “boy”, which we can assume is a racially charged term given his reaction to it: “When will I ever get to be a man?” And his description of the man who said it: “This was the face I remembered, the face of nightmares” (164-165). This language then shows up again later in the book, however this time it is Pete, an African-American, using it to describe Boona, when he is telling the Narrator of Boona’s theft: “I fear your boy has goofed”. This is especially interesting to me as I would have thought Pete would be acquainted enough with that term to not use it. Yet its use appears to be the same in both case.

The racism against Boona was really quite disappointing to me, especially since it is indicated that the narrator views Europe as a safe-haven from racism. However, there is a possibility that this wasn’t racism.  Maybe Boona was imagining the racism just as the Narrator may have done earlier. I doubt this, but what do you think? Did Boona steal the money? And if not, was his accusation racially motivated?

The First and the Last

Nine stories was quite the collection, the titular stories explored a variety of topics and plot lines. Despite these differences, there are a large number of parallels between the first story, A Perfect Day For Bananafish, and the last story, Teddy. The most obvious similarity is the endings, both ended with sudden and quite dramatic deaths. However, both deaths were foreshadowed heavily in their respective stories. There is also a key difference between the two deaths and that is the atmosphere behind them. On one hand, there is Seymour’s suicide caused by his inability to cope with past events, and on the other there is Teddy’s death, which seemed to move Teddy on to the “next” part of his life. One death looked to the past while the other looked to the future.

The next similarity was the children, both stories had a protagonist under the age of 13 who possessed knowledge and ability far beyond their age. In Bananafish young Sybil simply walks up to and starts hanging out with Seymour, which is quite unexpected for her age. And then there is Teddy, a boy of unprecedented spiritual intelligence, his abilities dwarf not just all kids but essentially everyone in Western society. This theme of smart children, is seen not just in the first and last stories but throughout the book.

There are some lines in the stories that appear to allude to the other story. My favorite line by far is when Seymour refers to Muriel as “Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948”, clearly referencing the spiritual themes of Teddy. Overall, I feel that the similarities between these stories serves to highlight a couple key ideas. The first is the intelligence of kids, this is something that Salinger seems to bring up throughout the book, with a variety of hyper-competent young people. The other thing it details is the perception of death, through the contrast between the two stories’ death scenes, the stories highlight just how little people know about death and how to react to it.

First Impressions of Salinger

Well that was quite the story. It felt more like three independent stories than one short story and I enjoyed all 3. To start with the the first part, the story of a young girl talking to her Mom. This had a very different style than Hemingway, it was so heavy on dialog. Personally, I really liked this, it made me care more about the characters, also as a teenager I found this part to be quite relatable. I mean who hasn’t had that conversation with their mother at some point.

The story then moved on to the young man and Sybil. Intriguingly, at no point are we ever given his name and I’m still not quite sure what their relationship is. Overall, though, the story was pretty normal and complacent. Though, I was worried for Sybil’s safety the entire time, something didn’t quite feel right about that situation. I was especially worried when he started talking about the Bananafish drowning, I was afraid he might be foreshadowing something. Yet, in the end, they both return to the shore and Sybil runs off. But, It did feel like Sybil may have known something wasn’t quite right, when she ran off.

The third part of the story then starts and my god did that escalate quickly. The way Salinger did that in so few lines was absolutely shocking. It reminded me a lot of the story “My Old Man” from In Our Time, when the Dad dies so suddenly in the horse racing accident. The end also leaves me with a lot of questions. Who was that girl? Was it the daughter from the start or someone else? Was the young man the boyfriend? I think it was but i’m not quite sure. Also why was he so angry about the girl looking at his feet? Whatever the answers to these questions are, if there are any, J. D Salinger appears to be quite the impressive writer and has managed to enthrall me in a way that Hemingway just couldn’t quite do.

Tales of Being Shot

This chapter Ghost Soldiers provided a very interesting perspective on one of the most iconic war stories: getting shot.  And Tim O’Brien presented us with two different versions of the story, the first didn’t seem so bad, in fact in a perverse way it sounded kinda nice.  He was joking with Rat throughout it and in the end he gets 26 days of R&R. On the flip side the second presented the horror story version of it, where everything that could wrong did go wrong. Here he almost loses his butt, the medic completely fails at his job, and the brotherhood that he had with his comrades collapses.

Overall these stories took me for an emotional joyride, they are just too good to be true. And that reminded me that they probably aren’t… Throughout the book Tim O’Brien has announced that the stories don’t have to be and probably shouldn’t be factually accurate. There are several signs of this in the first story. The way he “falls” into Rat Kiley’s arms, the references to the Gene Autry movies, the way it never even hurts, it's all just too surreal, it seems more like how someone fantasize about getting shot rather than someone who was actually shot.

On the flipside there is the absolutely dreadful experience of being shot in the butt and  then receiving ‘treatment from Bobby Jorgenson. Yet this one seemed more factual to me, it was grittier and more detailed, and as a result felt significantly more realistic. Still, I question his portrayal of Bobby Jorgenson. This chapter frames him as the most incompetent medic to ever wear a U.S military uniform, he forgets to treat for shock, fails to patch the wound correctly, and straight up fails to even go treat him until 10 minutes after he is shot. The portrayal is so negative that it must be biased. Clearly, Tim has a serious revenge complex going on here, just look at the ‘prank’ that occurs later, and I think that this desire for revenge has tainted his memory of what happened. Overall, while I doubt the specifics of the stories in this chapter, I am fairly confident that these are based on events that happened to Tim or someone else in his unit.