Lust Susan Minot Analysis

Sexual drives are the basis of human behaviour because the goal of most humans is to find a sexual partner for comfort and reproduction. When the narrator visits his lover’s grave, he reminisces about the times with his lover and is overwhelmed by grief. The narrator longs to be loved as he says, “Then I saw it was getting dark, and a strange, mad wish, the wish of a despairing lover, seized me” (Maupassant 151). The loss of his lover penetrates his mental anguish as it is human nature to desire to be loved. Thus, he is greatly affected by the loss of his sexual partner, as sexual drives often dictate behaviour.

Consciously, the woman communicates that she yearns for her lover, yearns to engage in sexual intercourse with him. Subconsciously, however, the need to “bear” her partner’s “weight” indicates that there is a burden attached to her expectations surrounding this engagement. This specific word choice takes the passion out of the erotic, so much so that the psychoanalytic interpreter is left to wonder why this woman is actively pursuing something that she clearly does not enjoy. To draw upon the developing thesis, the answer is that she does so in order to avoid acknowledging her repressed sexuality. In this way, the lover is not a ‘lover’ in the romantic sense of the word, but rather a sexual object. He is an objectified prop manipulated in order to fulfill

The story begins with young and pure love between Noah and Allie—Noah is a working class individual, while Allie is an upper class privileged girl. Their stories had many ups and downs from the moment it began. Both characters have different social status, as well as different families and therefore parenting styles. Allie’s parents follow more of an authoritarian parenting style. Which means that they are the sole ones who make decisions regarding anything that has to do with her. She does not have a voice when it comes to deciding what she would like to do. Her parents knew Noah was a good boy but he was not for her since he was not high on the economic ladder. On the other hand Noah’s parents were more authoritative, they made him have a word in regards to his life. They respected his decisions and supported him as well as everyone who was in close circle with him. Allie also has social pressures on her placed by her friends. Social pressures are pressures brought on by society, they are so strong that they cause you to take measures that might not be what you would like. In Allie’s case it would be getting forced into leaving Noah, knowing he was her one and only consummate love. Consummate love is the love we all search for in life. It contains intimacy, passion and commitment. After Allie took this big decision of leaving Noah, both of their lives changed

her father trusted him. It makes her sad and fearful of the power that her father possesses. She is

She flirts with many men and young adults throughout the play, which makes the reader feel a lack of sympathy for her as the men she desired ended up becoming major contributors to her eventual downfall, in particular Stanley.

Lastly, her family betrayed her by not listening to her side of the story after her sister told lies about her, and they betrayed her when they acted as if they did not care if she moved out of the house. In all of these actions, the family itself and certain members of the family are portrayed as uncaring, unsupportive, disrespectful, conniving, deceitful, and hateful to Sister. Through every action of the family, Sister is treated harshly, and she tries to not let this bother her. Yet, anger and bitterness build up inside of her until she cannot take it anymore. Consequently, it built up so much inside of her that it severely affected Sister so profoundly that she moved away from her home to get away from her family.

“Lust,” describes a young teenage girl who has mischievous meetings with many boys. The narrator, which is the young girl, attends Casey Academy which is a coed school. She is sexually active and does not fear pregnancy because she has been taking birth control pills since she was a young girl. The narrator describes her sexual expected gathering with the fifteen different boys she has been with, and when she talks about them she seems emotionally removed from the experience. The narrator’s parents don’t have a clue about what she has been getting herself into: “My parents had no idea. Parents never really know what’s going on, especially when you’re away at school most of the time. If she met them, my mother might say, “Oliver seems nice” or “I like that one” without much of an opinion...” (1029). The narrator’s parents do not show much interest in her life which can be a reason to why she craves

'Sex Without Love,' by Sharon Olds passionately described the author's disgust for casual sex in which she vividly animates the immorality of lustful sex through the variety of her language. The sarcasm used in this selection can easily be misunderstood and quite confusing if the words and lines are not analyzed with specific construction. Olds' clever use of imagery and frequent uses of similes, to make the reader imagine actual events, makes this poem come to life. For example, Olds describes making love as 'Beautiful as dancers.' (Line #2) in this line, she questions how one can do such a beautiful act with a person whom one is not in love with. Olds also describes sex as 'gliding over each other

"They turn casually to look at you, distracted, and get a mild distracted surprise, you're gone. Their blank look tells you that the girl they were fucking is not there anymore. You seem to have disappeared.(pg.263)" In Minot's story Lust you are play by play given the sequential events of a fifteen year old girls sex life. As portrayed by her thoughts after sex in this passage the girl is overly casual about the act of sex and years ahead of her time in her awareness of her actions. Minot's unique way of revealing to the reader the wild excursions done by this young promiscuous adolescent proves that she devalues the sacred act of sex. Furthermore, the manner in which the author illustrates to the reader these acts symbolizes the

eventually succumbs to these desires with whomever is available, even if that person is technically not “available”. “Sexy” in the collection Interpreter of Maladies written by award winning author Jhumpa Lahiri portrays a unique perspective of what an affair truly means. Miranda finds herself falling for a taken and older man, Dev, in the beautiful city of Boston. What she does not realize is that she is a mere prostitute he manipulates and plays around with free of charge to fulfill the role only his wife ought to have. The city is an enchanting place, or so it seems. Beneath the colossal skyscrapers and beautiful architecture, there are dark alleys. Similarly,

Not surprisingly for quite a few people, there seems to be a cloudy undertone in their consciousnesses that something exists amiss; as if a component within them became ill-informed or altered. Perhaps wondering why one’s Creator would be extremely generous to grant a person the incredible gift of their sexual beings, giving to them a desire for the warmth of love that longs for intimate closeness, sexual contact, and the romancing of their beings. Yet sadly, a great deal of the time, “this exact matter” dispenses a devastating amount of ungodly pain, causing misery and heartache. Undoubtedly, this perplexity transpires into confusion; for within this paradox dwells the sexual ‘bondage’ of humanity. From the elite superstar, to the down and out

She thinks that her father did not do enough to her mother and that he was supposed to give her mother everything for she felt that she very much deserved it all. It is so obvious that she is very much annoyed by the fact that her father was so poor and could not support the family financially; describing him to a person whose pocket was not going to

She writes “having displeased my father” (3, 5) and just this tells me that she is already trying to control her life, and she has not had very much experience with

The Lover by Marguerite Duras and Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker are both transgressive novels and post modernist fiction. Both novels tell a story of a young girl in which is experimenting with her sexuality at a young age. In The Lover the narrator is in love with a man who is giving her money. Blood and Guts in High School is a fictional novel about the main character’s love for her father amongst other men. The goal of this essay is to explore the desires in which drive both of the young women’s sexual behavior that Duras and Acker express through their narrators.

     In comparing this to Susan Minot’s Lust, we see many similarities in that both main characters of the stories have desire and intense wanting, but they are different in form. Minot uses many small, short encounters and stories to portray the main character’s life and emotions. Similar to Araby, the settings and atmosphere in which the young girl’s life takes place is very negative and unfriendly. Just from the first paragraph describing one of her boys, “In his illegal car we drove to the reservoir, radio blaring, talking fast, fast, fast. He got kicked out sophomore year,” we see that the people she is associating with and the settings are not very positive. Similar Mangan’s sister in Araby, the only positive light and desire the main character has are interactions with boys and boyfriends, but all seem to only last for a very brief time. The girl’s desire is more mature and sexually