The Story Of An Hour

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In "The Story of an Hour," I can relate to so many different things that go on in this short tragic story. After reading the story I almost felt like Louise Mallard and I were living the same life with different events and a different outcome. Everything about the two of us comes down to being always misunderstood and just wanting to be free.

In the beginning of the story, we look at Louise Mallard from a bird's eye point of view. Louise is introduced as a devoted young wife who has been told the news of her husband's unfortunate death. When Chopin goes deeper into Louise's thoughts and feelings, they surprisingly contradict her initial description of her. I grew up in New Jersey my whole life. I lived in a huge house and everyone in my family drove nice, expensive cars. Everyone in my town pretty much knew who I was because of my family. In the town I lived in, this kind of popularity was a normal, everyday thing. Everybody on my street lived just as good as or better than me. Being different than all the other "rich kids" on the block, I hated that appearance that we were better than others, more privileged. I was definitely not what people expected to me to be. I didn't go to high school at Seton Hall Prep with the other "rich kids." I didn't like them. Instead I went to a more relaxed private high school called Chancellor Academy where the kids were definitely not like all the other "rich kids." These people were my real friends and could care less how much money I had. On top of not going to the school where everyone thought I should go, I was a skateboarder. What an image they have. So now not only am I looked at as a spoiled, little, rich kid, but a spoiled, little punk skateboarder. That was not who I was. I just wan...

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...ken free of everything that had been holding us back.

The end of the story is such a tragedy for me because I feel like Louise and I have such a connection. When Louise went down stairs with her sister and witnessed her husband walk through the door, her heart gave out and she died. This event to me is like finally getting to Gainesville and realizing that my parents were still just a phone call away to smother me. Though I can do what I want, it's nothing like how I thought it would be. I love my parents with all my heart, and Louise sometimes loved her husband. The doctors said that Louise died from her heart disease, "Of joy that kills (16, paragraph 23.)" For me that was the tragedy, that again Louise was misunderstood. Though the events in my life are not as painful as Louise Mallards, we are similar in a sense that all we want is to be free and understood.

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