Tall Tales From The Mekong Delta Summary

ROY G. BIV. An acronym children are taught at a young age that represents the colors of the rainbow. As children we do not think of anything deeper than the colors themselves, for they are beautiful on their own. However, in Tall Tales From The Mekong Delta, Kate Braverman uses colors in a meticulous fashion to represent something much deeper and darker than they appear. Parts of the story are unexplainable, like why she does not give the main character a name. For the sake of this essay, her name will be “she” or “her”. Dealing with an imaginary man named Lenny, she figures out what his true intentions are. The colors that illuminate her life and the seasons involved are all factors of her struggling addiction. In exploring the colors,

During autumn, the colored leaves, such as red, orange, and yellow, become brown and fall off with harshness of winter. “She didn’t say anything. They were walking across a parking lot. The autumn made everything ache. Later, it would be worse. At dusk, with the subtle irritation of lamps”(96). In her situation, autumn represents the changing of her life from summer, or being drug-free, to autumn and then to winter. Autumn separates summer and winter as a transition period, which occurs because of her reestablished drug usage. Moving into winter, her body and mind are dead like the leaves that fall off of the trees. At this point she will be fully engulfed with heroin usage and will have relapsed. Her “aches” are the transitions her mind undertakes as she goes familiarizes herself with narcotics. Her body and mind shocks are consistently disrupting her, although she craves them because the irritation leads to “lamps” or her inspiration to write. “Lamps” constitute the idea that she will be at her peak, or the max high. At this high, she will have the inspiration she craves and cannot get any other way. She thinks of being high before she becomes it. She wants the inspiration to right and even looks forward to it, which shows that her mind disorients by being around Lenny and autumn. The season of autumn transitions her into the season of winter, when her body decides to

From the cigarette they shared to the Ferrari ride, she risks her life to be with this so called “man”. “Silence. She was looking at Lenny’s legs, how white the exposed skin was. She was thinking that he brought his sick body to her, that he was bloated, enormous with pathology and bad history, with jails and demented resentments”(98). What she thinks of him represents what happened in the past and what will happen to her if she decides to continue her drug use. “Bad history” and “jails” are only two small snippets of her previous life that she tries to forget but cannot due to Lenny. By bringing “his sick body to her”, she will be relapse. His disgusting figure repulses her because she tries as hard as she can to resist temptation. The image in her head must be ugly so she does not fall back on old habits. The more time she spends with him the more handsome he becomes, pulling her in to using once more. For now he looks ugly because she does not want anything to do with drugs but in time they become more enticing and alluring. Her mind tricks her into thinking that Lenny will eventually stop but he does the exact opposite. He ceases to exist as a real human being and prevails solely in her mind. She thinks that his Ferrari, drugs, and mansion are real but they are not and he represents the drugs she takes. With how “white” his skin looks, it means that she has