jennifer's review of my paper

8/6/2019 Jennifer's Review of My Paper

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Brittney Grubb

Professor Hall

English 2100

28 Jan 2011

Undeniable Theme of Grief in Hell-Heaven and By-and-By

Common themes being portrayed throughout several particular pieces can often

give those pieces a sense of unity. In both Amy Blooms By-and-By and Jhumpa Lahiris

Hell-Heaven , there is a shared theme of grief that the reader can identify based on the

personalities and traits given to each of the characters. Based on the witnessed death of

the main characters best friend, By-and-By draws immediate sympathy and

understanding. Having worked in a felafel joint on Charles Street, as Blooms main

character did, it is clear that she is incorporating her own past experiences or emotions

into her story, as she also scooped felafel for a living before her writing career began,

thus unconsciously, or consciously, transferring her own genuine feelings from past

experiences and observations into her stories. Lahiris story, as well, is primarily based

on the continuation of life throughout generations, specifically centered on the

differences of various cultures and its emotional effect on the lives of both children and

adults. This draws particular attention to the jealousy experienced by the main character

towards someone born of another culture, which was inspired by the authors careful

observance of the cultures of the United States and India. The grief experienced by the

characters in both of the texts is both relatable and reasonable, because of its naturalistic

plot and realistic derivative. Comment [j1]: Is this your central idea? It seemlike a difficult one to prove and support from thetexts. Try making it a little more concrete, likesomething you could point to directly in the stories.


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Though both stories incorporated grief in their own manners, the authors explored

two completely different paths in portraying it, both based on human emotions, and both

immediately recognizable in their own way. After a simple first reading of the story By-

and-By , there are three distinguished parts that are not typically incorporated in the

sharing of a tragic event, such as the loss of a friend. These make a special emphasis on

the physical death of a body, the stages it takes for the heart to shut down, and the rigid

details that encompass the slow decomposition of the body after death. The story sets off

this mood in the very first few sentences by its description of the human eye: Every

death is violent. The iris, the rainbow of the eye, closes down. The pupil spreads out like

dark water. Immediately the tone of the piece becomes one of sorrow, but the dimension

of it is taken even deeper. The iris is the part of the eye that distinguishes the color of

your eye, hence, the rainbow of the eye. Everyone knows that eyes are also black and

white surrounding that ring of color, but people distinguish the color of your eye by that

particular piece, that unique section. All of the color has left this persons body; all that

used to distinguish that person from others has been emptied from them. Theyve become

just another victim of death, and will decay like every other living body that dies. From

the very beginning, the main character makes certain her story is as sorrowful to the

reader as it is to her: that loved one has passed away and it needs to be understood, right

away, how that feels: empty.

Along with darkness is the sense of emptiness that the main character suffers.

Death is interesting, because sympathy is generated the second a person dies, but

sympathy lingers, and transforms to grief, if a lifestyle changes because of that death. It

has a way of continuing, impacting daily life, which is exactly what happened to this


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character. It was exactly due to Anne that I was able to walk through the world like a

normal person. Because of that statement, it can be understood what message Bloom

was trying to convey: after gaining understanding about the world and life within it from

Anne, her absence in the girls life made living now seem empty to the central character.

This absence continues to linger towards the end of the story as the main character

consciously blames Eugene Trask, the rapist and murderer of her best friend, for every

death that she has witnessed or had to deal with in her life, including her father: My

young father, still slim and handsome and a good dancer, collapsed on our roof trying to

straighten our ancient TV antennae and Eugene Trask pulled his feet out from under him,

over the gutters and thirty feet down. Trask literally became the icon of grief in her life.

Jhumpa Lahiris Hell-Heaven has a number of conflicts worth considering, each

character having i ts own thoughts and perspectives to consider. Social interactions and

cultural based living are the most notable depictions of grief in this piece. The first, of

which, is romantic relationships. In introducing the characters, Lahiri informs us that the

three Bengalis, Pranab, Boudi, and the main character, are inseparable. Boudi desired this

Calcutta natives company because they confronted each other in a way she and my

father never did and he transported my mother back to the world shed left to marry my

father. Her sensitivity towards the attention she was receiving from him was a cure to

the unannounced, but heavily evident, grief that she had been experiencing from having

lost the intimate relationship she had once had with her husband, and the freedom from

forced marriage that she had enjoyed before they were married. The lack of love

exchanged in their marriage is again emphasized when Deborah and Prahab became

engaged: by summer there was a diamond on Deborahs left hand, something my mother

Comment [j2]: This sentence is a little confusingTry rewording it.

Comment [j3]: Like we talked about in class, wealready know that grief is present in the stories. Tryto come up with something more specific about grief to use as your central idea. Consider adding another sentence to transition into the next paragraph.

Comment [j4]: Since youre talking aboutcharacters use his or her instead of it.

Comment [j5]:Usha


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had never received. Her husband is also miserable in the marriage, though. It is never

stated that he does not love his wife, but he is pleased with Pranabs ability to make her

happy: my father was grateful to Pranab Kaku for the companionship he provided, freed

from the responsibility he must have felt for forcing her to leave India, and relieved,

perhaps, to see her happy for a change. Undoubtedly, he was miserable in the marriage,

having married her just to placate his parents. The authors careful words, one might

think that he would have felt slightly jealousbut my guess is that my father was

grateful, though, reminds the reader that those words are not from his point of view,

leaving the reader unsure of the direct cause of the grief, but affirmed in knowing that he

was encountering it, possibly just because of the very fact that he was forced to be

married. This was made even more apparent once it is taken into consideration how

insistent he was to not tell Prahab that his parents would disown him if he married an

American woman. One must truly analyze the reasoning behind his concern for him if he

is to discover the underlying bond he had with him, even though he didnt know him.

Living a troubled marriage, the only reason for refusal to admit hard truths to him is to

save him from calling off the marriage and marrying the woman his parents had assigned

to him back in Calcutta, thus making the same mistake he had many years ago in

marrying Boudi. Other, more obvious, relational problems arose as well. Prahabs

marriage to Deborah, which the mother never approved of, due to her being an American

and, more primarily, that she would live a happy marriage with the man that Boudi had

fallen in love with. The main character, as well, had an interest in Deborah because her

lifestyle consisted of freedom, something the Bengalis never received, and because she

gave her the sorts of gifts my parents had neither the money nor the inspiration to buy.

Comment [j6]: You can speculate this point, butits hard to prove by just looking at the text.


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The mother now has three immediate losses, the ongoing loss, if it can be counted as

such, of her husbands love, her daughters affection, which was now shifted to Deborah,

and Prahab in his entirety, who completely departs from her life. By the main characters

teenage years, Boudi had infected her daughter with the aftermath of her grieving over

the loss of Prahab. Becoming bitter towards her mother, she sets off to make her own

decisions for herself, even with her mothers disapproval, and with as harsh of words as

were necessary to get her way: When she screamed at me for talking too long on the

telephone, or for staying too long in my room, I learned to scream back, telling her that

she was pathetic, that she knew nothing about me, and it was clear to us both that I had

stopped needing her, definitively and abruptly, just as Pranab Kaku had. This inevitably

led to the same fate for her daughter as she had lived. It was to me that she confessed,

after my own heart was broken by a man Id hoped to marry.

While both stories have unique approaches to this vast human emotion, they do

settle on one particular agreement as to how it affects people. Both of the stories portray

the continuation of grief through multiple generations, based on lifestyle, and the result it

has on the decisions made by individuals throughout their early stages of maturity and

growth, through to their adulthood. Taking the focus off of the main character in By-and-

By, attention should be redirected to other characters as well. This is especially so, in this

case, with the antagonist, Eugene Trask. Because of the point of view in this story,

Eugene is given little to no attention or consideration as to the reasoning behind his

actions. With a closer look, though, it becomes obvious that his childhood played an

important role in his adulthood. Like in Hell-Heaven, where the main characters mother

lost the man she loved, though he just became absent in her life instead of dying, the

Comment [j7]: This is a good argument. It mightmake a good addition to your central idea becauseits very specific and ties both stories together.


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same happens with Eugene, as he loses a close personal connection to his father at a

young age due to his bed-wetting problem: he knew his way around the woods because

their father threw him out of the house naked, in the middle of the night, whenever he wet

his bed, which he did all his life. His grieving over the desire for his fathers affection

led to his need, or so it seemed to him, to rape women, to fulfill that void of love with the

forced affection of others, since he could never force his father into feeding that need in

his childhood. This, in turn, caused grief of others in his adulthood, because of the acts

that he committed.

Grief, as an overall theme, runs rapid through the emotions and acti ons of

characters portrayed by both Lahiri and Bloom. T hey both, however, have a unique

means of forcing the reader to pay careful attention to the things not said, the actions not

made, and the events that didnt happen. The most prominent and identifiable details in

both stories to the main theme are found in the complete lack of direct expression of it,

but instead in emotional assumptions made by the reader.

Comment [j8]: I like how you pointed out grief in this character too. I wouldnt have thought to dothat, but its a good point!

Comment [j9]: You have a lot of solid evidenceto support that grief is present in the stories. But Ifeel like this kind of statement would be difficult tosupport. Since were using the text as a source, Imnot sure what kind of proof you could find to arguethis. Overall your essay is very convincing, but likewe were talking about in class, you might be able tofind a more specific argument to make about grief for your central idea.

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