Our Secret Susan Griffin Analysis

The Fragmentation of Life

Reading through the very beginning of Susan Griffin’s “Our Secret” felt like reading Shakespeare for the first time as a sticky fingered, toothless, second grader. It just did not make sense...my mind couldn’t quite comprehend it yet. Nothing in the essay seemed to be going in any clear direction, and the different themes in each of the paragraphs did not make sense to me. There was no flow – as soon as you began to comprehend and get used to one subject, she would switch it up on you and start talking about something else that seemed unrelated. As I pushed forward, it seriously was beginning to feel like she was drawing topics out of a hat as she went. That was until I hit around halfway through the second page. This is where Griffin introduces her third paragraph about cell biology: “Through the pores of the nuclear membrane a steady stream of ribonucleic acid, RNA, the basic material from which the cell is made, flows out (234).” She was talking about the basic unit of

Although many come to the conclusion that it is an essay about life and humanity, not everyone understands her motives for splitting it up the way she does, and why doing so adds so much to her theme. By scattering the separate pieces of each thread the way she does, she is not only mimicking human diversity and human “fragmentation” (my way of saying the division of people into categories), but she is also connecting ideas to a common theme, much like the way we are all connected to humanity. Her writing is not clear and connected perfectly because neither is humanity. Life and they ways we are all interconnected is scattered - a crazy huge puzzle we are still all trying to piece together each day. While we are all so different and segregated, where are still united by a common theme of humanity, and so is Griffin’s