Lust Susan Minot

1175 Words3 Pages

We all crave at some point in our lives social acceptance. Either we make an unnecessary joke, imitate others, embellish our style, or forwardly lie into a superficial identification. In the short story "Lust" by Susan Minot, the author creates and develops the main character as a girl who is emotionally disconnected and is craving for significance and attention. The author generates her not by her physical assets but rather by her emotions and actions. Susan Minot keeps the main character “unknown” and with no kosher name in order to construct the character. The narrator seeks acceptance and identity but through an unhealthy number of sexual encounters and as the she tries to find herself, she only loses herself into an even deeper sadness …show more content…

The narrator no longer lives in a fog, but now she sees how vile and cruel her life is. How disconnected the people around her are. Minot demonstrates very clearly how boys’ sexual desire completely dominates the narrator and how girls are compelled by other girls as well as boys to accede to that desire. For example, when the narrator was speaking with her teacher and friends her friend complained about how men always want something from you and another friend replied with “you always feel like you have to deliver something.” Their teacher tells the girls “you do” she continues “babies.” This shows how even the adults in her life are disconnected and don’t carry women’s standards highly with respect. The girls always have to give something while the men just take and in this case, the little bit of dignity the character ever owned was taken from her and the saddest part was that she let it happen. The difference between the character at the beginning and how she was made to be in the end is that at the beginning she showed no feelings, no shame, and no remorse but now. Now she feels shame. She feels guilt. In order to get what she wanted she used sex but by using sex, she only reduced her chances of ever feeling real love and real importance. The narrator demonstrates her agony and detachment with post haste only at the very end of the story. The authors writing is connected to how the narrator feels. As her writing style became less fragmented, it signaled the zenith realization of truth within the main character. "After sex, you curl up like a shrimp, something deep inside you ruined, slammed in a place that sickens at slamming, and slowly you fill up with an overwhelming sadness, an elusive gaping worry. You don't try to explain it, filled with the knowledge that it's nothing after all, everything filling up finally and absolutely with death (Minot 280)”. The main character has grasped all of this, but it’s already too late.

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