The novel, Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney narrates the life of a young man who is struggling to keep his job by day, while visiting many bars and nightclubs during the night and doing cocaine, to which he is extremely addicted. Throughout the novel, McInerney makes use of the Coma Baby as a symbolic representation of the narrator himself. The Coma Baby has been living in its mother’s womb after the mother suffered a car accident and entered a coma. Through the words between the narrator and the Coma Baby, the protagonist wants to avoid facing the harsh realities of life and continue living isolated in his own narcotic-induced world. It isn’t until Coma Baby leaves the womb alive when the narrator is finally “alive” as well.
The Coma Baby is shown to be a symbolic representation of the narrator through his actions and attitude towards life, which is careless and indifferent. In this passage the main character is experiencing a dream where he is interacting with Coma Baby. As the narrator approaches the Baby, he immediately opens his eyes, almost as if he knew the protagonist was in his presence. The narrator proceeds to ask the Baby if he’s ever going to come out. The Baby responds with, “No way Jose. I like it in here. Everything I need is pumped in.” (54) The Baby acts very stubbornly as well as seen here:
“But Mom’s on her way out.” “If the old lady goes, I’m going with her.” The Coma Baby sticks his purple thumb in his mouth. You try to reason with him, but he does a deaf-and-dumb routine. “Come out”, you say…”They’ll never take my alive”, the Baby says. (55)
The Baby gets what he wants at his very own convenience, and therefore has no motivation to even want to leave the mother’s stomach. The Baby’s actions parallel...
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...has left on him. He laughs uncontrollably until he has lost consciousness. Seeing Amanda with her fiancé and hearing her unexpected question was all the closure the narrator needed to move on.
The last scene of the novel is the beginning of the narrator’s new life. He trades his Ray-Bans for bread. The firing from his job, thinking back to his mother, seeing Amanda were all events that led up to the moment where the narrator can truly start to live again. Staying inside his narcotic-induced world as the Coma Baby was staying inside the mother’s womb kept him isolated, miserable, and stuck. The fate of Coma Baby foreshadowed the fate of the narrator. The end of the Coma Baby and the start of the alive Baby parallels to the end of the narrator’s past and the start of a new life. “You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again.” (182)
In conclusion, the story describes that life changes, and nothing stays the same throughout it. It is in the hands of the people to decide that how they want their life to be. They can make it as beautiful as they want to and they can also make it worse than it has ever been
The baby is the symbol of the Continuation. The death of the child indicated the wish to terminate forever the hierarchy which will not haunt the offspring. “Plugging in” means to block which reinforce the dream of her aunt that is to seal the old society and accelerate the arrival of the new society.
Stanza two shows us how the baby is well looked after, yet is lacking the affection that small children need. The child experiences a ‘vague passing spasm of loss.’ The mother blocks out her child’s cries. There is a lack of contact and warmth between the pair.
Conflicts within the heart can be seen again with Baby, additional to her loss of innocence. She is in an environment hungry for fatherly and motherly figures; Baby is lacking the stability and support that is crucial in a healthy development. Jules is never physically there for Baby, allowing her to go through several foster homes. She admits that Jules is always “gone longer that he said he would be… when a parent splits on you once, they are guaranteed to do it again” (58). Jules is blindly removing himself from Baby’s life and Baby cannot take it anymore. She notices that after Jules went to rehab he “got the unfortunate idea that I could handle myself without him” (52). She is deprived from the closest form of love she can receive and even that is impossible to obtain. Because Jules is hardly ever around, Baby has to learn how to survive into society on her own, using the morals she knows by watching Jules, like Jules’ remedy to life, separating from feeling. Jules and Baby’s mother had Baby at fifteen, and soon after, Baby’s mother passed away. Here again, the most important love, a motherly love, is impossible for Baby to get. It appears that every time she meets an older woman, who shows her some sort of affection, she describes that she feels comforted. After Jules had ripped apart Baby’s only beloved doll (the doll Baby’s mother gave to her), Baby goes for a walk. She passes by her friend Theo’s house and sees his mother in the doorway, wanting to see “if she would try and hurt me that way she had hurt Theo. I’d take her punches just like Theo had” (120). But when Theo’s mother calls Baby over, she appears to be very loving and interested in Baby’s relationship with Theo. She even tells Baby, “Come here, I want to give you a hug. You don’t get enough hugs. I can see that. I’ll give you one of my special teddy bear hugs” (121). Following that, Baby
...pparent. When the baby saw Angela's face she had no reaction, because baby's are still so naïve and that obviously doesn't matter to them. Although the baby did not notice anything different about Angela, the baby's mother did and she quickly pulled her baby away from Angela, making clear how her disease was slowly taking over her life.
...r members of the animal kingdom, humans have not evolved any longer with such strong maternal instinct. Nurseries probably trapped and imprisoned many a young mother who listened to society and did what she thought she was supposed to. And once they got there, maybe they realized it was not how they wanted to live their life. Yet, they could not abandon their families and children, and so they were trapped by the cradle, the toys, the bottles, the nursery.
The first pages of this work quickly establishes this extremely effective stylistic imagery and quickly captures the readers attention, making it a chore to be diverted from reading this famous work. She begins with the metaphor, which likens writing this novel to better herself "as when you paint your portrait for a friend," (Longman p. 1863; l. 5) and it continues to connect the past and present for that friend. The imagery is so real that the reader quickly becomes completely enthralled within the world Browning is describing. Just twelve lines into the work, she masterfully creates a tender and calming scene of an infant smiling in its sleep, due to its understanding of the infinite nature of life. Then broadening the view of the scene to include the watchful mother outside the nursery, calming the household to insure the continued peaceful rest of the infan...
An infant is created helpless, the infant depend on their mother for nine months for every need that they have. One day before the infant realizes what is going on they are being introduced to a new, loud, bright, big scary world. Right from birth the infant is poked and prodded and passed from person to person then the infant is placed in their mother’s arms. As the infant lays down on their mother’s chest the infant feels the warmth of their mother’s body. The infant hears a familiar sound of their mother’s voice as the infant on their mother’s chest then starts to cry. The only way this infant can commutate is by crying. The only way the infant knows to get there needs met are by crying but what happen to the infant and parent when the infant is left to cry it out?
This continues to talk about the anise drink, symbolizing the hollow womb is the abortion were to take place. The man want to get rid of the baby so he can see the whole world, if the baby were to be born, his dream would not be fulfilled. This can be incorporated into my essay by talking about how the man was really thinking about himself first. He want to see the world, with or without the
Korb, Rena. "Critical Essay on 'Désirée's Baby'." Short Stories for Students. Ed. Jennifer Smith. Vol. 13. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Web. 01 Mar. 2014.
The next couple of lines tell of how the father holds this tiny new life in his hands and warms the child with his own body. This symbolizes the protection he will give his
During the Babies documentary, the four babies are in their first year of life. This is Erikson’s stage, Trust vs. Mistrust. The question during this stage is, “Is the world a safe place or is it full of accidents and unpredictable events?” During this stage, the infant looks to their primary caregiver for care, whether stable or unstable. Infants try to find a send of predictability, consistency and trust. Erikson believes that all caregiving behavior will lead to this. If the infant receives stable care, then they will develop a sense of trust. If they don’t, they will develop a sense of mistrust for the
...pposed to kiss Mary Elizabeth but he didn't so she broke up with Charlie) leaving him back at the start, with no friends. This was a bad time because Charlie begins to start going “bad” again which means he starts to have flashbacks, and he gets really depressed. He saves Patrick from a fight at school which is kind of like a forgiveness from his friends to let him hang out and talk to them again. Charlie helps Sam get into a college and soon all of his friends leave to go to college. He gets bad again and ends up going to the hospital. When Sam and Patrick come over to Charlie's house, this is like closure to Charlie and they drive through the tunnel for the closing page. I think that the author did a very good job in choosing when the events in the book would happen. It seemed like a teenagers life and he changed it up some so that the reader wouldn't get so bored.
the end of the novel as both the women in his life have other men at
There is no voice more comforting than Mama’s. In the womb we are suspended in safe warmth, hearing every noise that Mama makes. And we don’t just hear her voice. We feel its vibrations, its muffled hum, through our ears and our entire forming bodies. It’s no wonder that that is often the only voice that can comfort us in the distress of our new little lives. Yet, what of the mother who cannot speak? Can she still comfort her baby? Yes, because it is much more than vocal chords that connect a baby with its birth mother. After all, Baby eats all that Mama eats, breathes Mama’s air, knows Mama’s way of moving and laughing…Baby feels every surge of adrenaline that Mama feels. Bonds don’t get more intimate than that. Even after Baby is born, this bond is strengthened through long bouts of staring into each other’s eyes, through feeling the lulling rhythm of Mama’s breathing while sleeping against her chest, through time spent together saturated in touch and play. This phenomenon of intimacy is so powerful that it surpasses any blindness or handicap Mama could possibly have.