Analysis Of Jean In Dead Man's Cell Phone

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Similar to Yank, Jean in Dead Man’s Cell Phone also lacks knowledge regarding social boundaries that eventually leads to her unpleasant ending, coma. The first awareness she lacks is about not getting too involved in a stranger’s life. Jean, at first, is not interfering with Gordon’s incoming phone calls, thus is playing her stranger role really well until she loses her self-control, “reaches for the cell phone…[and] answers it” (Ruhl 9). Her action of invading some stranger 's property without the owner’s consent is both illegal and socially unacceptable, showing that Jean lacks the awareness of social boundaries. However, her action is not considered as a serious invasion until she decides to promise that she will “stay with [him]...[f]or …show more content…

Jean agrees to meet the Other Woman even though she does not know who the woman is and what her relationship is with Gordon. Jean however knows very clearly that she does not know anything about the Other Woman at all, so she chooses to make a very broad guess of “You must be—his friend” (20) in the hope that she can collect some information from the Other Woman as she goes along with her lies such as how “Gordon mentioned [the Other Woman]... [and] said: tell her that I love her… [before] he turned his face away and died” (21). Jean is obviously telling lies because first of all, the audience all know that she did not even talk to Gordon at all; and second of all, Ruhl uses many dashes in Jean’s monologue, especially when Jean tells the Other Woman that Gordon “said that other women seemed like clocks compare to [her]—other women just—measured timer—broke the day up—but that [she]—[she] stopped time... just by walking into a room” (22), to show that Jean is actually improvising all her lies as she speaks. Based on the fact that Jean is meeting and telling the Other Woman some made up lies, it is obvious that Jean is not aware that what she has done is socially unacceptable and is crossing the social boundaries. Another example of Jean’s telling lies is demonstrated when she presents the fake “presents for

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