Analysis Of Hold Tight By Amy Bloom

[Name] [Professor] [Subject] [Date] Amy Bloom's "Hold Tight" Some writers are born to give stories that intrigue and touch from beneath in the heart. Amy Bloom’s collection of short stories in her book “A blind man can see how much I love you” is a clear depiction of love and loss, of suffering and of endurance, and of struggles and survivals. One of her stories “Hold Tight” gives the readers insight in to the effects and influences of a the sickness of a mother on her daughter. The terminal illness may bring her death, but that may also bring about suffering of implacable nature in others that surround and comfort her. It is asserted that the vitality of the “mother's painting, "Lot's Wife", in Amy Bloom's "Hold Tight" can be compared to the meaning associated with Anna Ahkmatova's poem "Lot's Wife" in the sense that both women find importance in the destroyed city of Sodom, the physical pain of dying, and the story of Lot's wife herself. The destroyed city of Sodom is significant to both Amy Bloom and Anna Ahkmatova because it symbolizes the destroyed lives of the mother and of Lot's wife. In "Hold Tight" the portion of the mother's painting that is the destroyed city of Sodom is described by Amy Bloom as "bright and grim, were the sticky little flames of the destroyed city, nothing, not even rubble, around it." This is symbolic of the Mother's destroyed life because she was dying and her husband and daughter were becoming more dysfunctional the closer to dying she became. Bloom writes "more often than not, we'd end up back in the brown fog of his study, me taking a last few puffs with my legs thrown over his big leather armchair, my father sipping his bourbon and staring out at the backyard." The husband and daughter are dealin...

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...thus comparing uses the tale of Lot's Wife to attach importance to the story of a mother and her siblings in the "Hold Tight” by using the notion that the dying woman is not someone that one ought to feel pity upon, but that is a woman one ought to say, yes this is the most remarkable woman with exceptional strength to cope with life’s stresses and difficulties. Difficulties that would give in the end miseries for the ones that are left behind, but even so, the strength, that would one day hold tight the grievances and expand the courage to live. References Bloom, Amy. "Hold Tight." The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Meyer, Michael. Boston: 2002. 650-654. Ahkmatova, Anna. "Lot's Wife." The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Meyer, Michael. Boston: 2002. 1198 ~ Work cited available at http://www.superioressays.com/DisplayPaper.php?PaperID=7, Accessed 21/06/03