Pick Up, It 's The Cuckoo Calling

Suicide affects many all around the world and suicide rate keep increasing, making suicide a growing concern. In the film Cake, the main character Claire Bennett develops an odd fascination with the suicide of a woman from her support group. In this paper, I will focus on Claire.

Automatically, the reader knows that serious issues are about to be discussed and that the outcome may not be positive. This novel challenges the material ideology discussed above. It does this by bringing the issues to the forefront and reporting on them in a fictitious yet realistic manner. The reader is not led to believe that the ending will be happy, he is supposed to expect the consider the harsh realities of the world throughout the piece.

Suicide is a sensitive topic for most people, and in the GQ article “Are You Sure You Want To Quit The World”, Nadya Labi creates a strong ethos as she writes a nonfiction article about an online predator who preyed on people going on suicide chat sites. In the article Nadya writes about how a man named William Melchert-Dinkel under the online pseudonym Li Dao would go on suicide chat rooms and do his best to convince people to go through with their suicidal thoughts and hang themselves, and Celia Blay, with the help of another woman Kat Lowe, do what they can to hunt him down. In doing this she creates a nonfiction piece the manifests itself as typical hero and rival story, a story in which the hero, protagonist, or good-doer attempts to stop the villain, rival, antagonist or wrong doer from whatever harm they with to inflict. Even more specifically, Labi piece can be read as a detective story, in which the hero goes through trials and research in order to hunt down a criminal whose identity is often initially unknown.

He first emphasizes how ample and bright the place is. He also narrates how there are “poisonous particles… as motes in sun-beams, into the lungs” (40). He expresses how suffocating this place is with a cough (14). The fact that the women don’t cough and are “used to it” is like saying they don’t breathe anymore. He describes the women as the “blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands” (12). He portrays these women as cadavers being preserved in this cold place, like a morgue. He says, “…face pale with work, and blue with cold; an eye supernatural with unrelated misery” (11). He is intentionally making the reader feel they are dead alive through the description of a physical death, then a social and emotional death.

Poetry has a way of expressing its rage, grief, and irony at society and its social pressures. Although each poem is different, they can carry a similar message that resonance with its audience. Barbie Doll by Marge Piercy and The Death of Marilyn Monroe by Sharon Olds express how beauty weighs women’s lives and cause a tragic end from being the perfect specimen. Both discuss a similar theme but carry the message out a difference way. In order to understand its similarities and differences it is necessary to analyze the text to find its denotation and connotation. The poems Barbie Doll and The Death of Marilyn Monroe share the themes of death and beauty, and how beauty affects society.

The poem Suicide Note, written by Janice Mirikitani (1987), talks about a young lady, who has studied in an Asian-American female college. The lady, unfortunately, committed suicide by jumping through her dormitory’s window. She left behind a note, citing reasons that led to her actions. After a critical analysis of the note, her parents were held responsible for her actions; they were pressurizing her to perform better in her exams. The poem, thus, describes the real feelings and the emotions of this young lady, who believes that committing suicide is the only option left to please her parents and to escape the enormous pressure placed on her. The persona uses voice in the poem to bring our attention to the sufferings she was going through, and that led to the devastating event. Voice in poetry is the strong words of a line, stanza or a page that creates a relationship between the audience and the persona. Voice can, therefore, be categorized as imagery, patterns of sounds created, rhythm, tone, and diction (Gahern 166). The following is a description of how the voice in Mirikitani’s suicide note helps the reader understand the persona’s reasoning.

What would you do if you were given what you thought was the perfect life and it suddenly seemed to turn upside-down? Would you jump to your death or climb back up? “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window” by Joy Harjo is a poem about a women who is lost in this big world we live in and trying to find herself while hanging from a thirteenth floor window. While this woman is hanging there she starts to have flashbacks about her life starting from her childhood up until now. The author goes into detail about why this woman is thinking about killing herself because of all the pressures of trying to be some she is not is catching up to her. This poem represents everyday people and how they first have to overcome themselves and

Janice Mirikitani “Suicide Note” is the speaker of this short poem with 63 lines in it. The poem is a dramatic monologue. It tells a small story about how an Asian-American girl who is in college, committed suicide because she was not able to meet the expectations for herself and her family. She talked about how each failure effects are greatly, how standing on the ledge reminded her about how a sparrow is about to take flight, and she reminds me of a few people in school that have gone through similar instances like the girl but, did not go through with it fully.

The image of “People jumped from the Sixth Street bridge into the Allegheny River. [...] Now he was leaving American Standard to go down the river, and he was a couple of bucks in the hole” (Dillard, 8) depicts the picture of the darkness Dillard grew up around in, because the reader can see that, despite Pittsburgh being a “cheerful town”, people jumped to their death so often in front of her father’s office that his co-workers and him had a bet on the date and time the next victim would emerge. With this in mind, she grew up listening to these suicide stories, learning, understanding, taking them in her conscious. Notably, this is significant because the reader can tell that Dillard grew up in an environment that called for her to comprehend

She begins her work by describing her morning, comparing it to an avalanche, “ It had been like dying, “ She wrote. “ that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. IT was like slipping into fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering. “ Setting the tone for the essay, death and irrational thoughts filling her mind as it unfolds around her. She compares the avalanche to death, foreshadowing her own avalanche, an avalanche of the mind.

Simple claim: In these lines, we view a teenage girl, who is in a rebellious stage. She is lives being ignored by her father and constantly criticized by her mother. She develops bad feelings toward her mother and wishes her to be dead. She feels misunderstood and alone that she wants to die.

The speaker states, “This air will not hold me, the snow burdens my crippled wings” (45-46). The speaker describes herself as a fragile bird forced down by the snow because she is weak. The snow represents men keeping women suppressed, and the speakers crippled wings are what the years of oppression have done to her already. The speaker repeats these words several times, “not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not strong enough” (3, 8, 22, 30, 41, 48). Rearranged in different orders throughout the poem the repetition of similar word phrases induce an emotional response to the poem, and sets a sorrowful tone. The title of the poem “Suicide Note” predicts what will come of the speaker at the end of the poem, which is the act of committing suicide. The actual suicide stands for a bigger picture in the speaker’s life; for it is the only way, she can free herself from the harsh gender inequalities that haunt her every thought. The speaker becomes free from oppression, ridicule, pain, and suffering for the first time when she ends her life.

In her poem “Wanting to Die”, Anne Sexton explains the feeling of suicidal ideation to an unnamed individual. Following the form of contemporary poets, she takes an incredibly taboo topic and discusses it in a conversational tone, thereby shocking the reader and forcing them to think about the issue in an unconventional way. The poem lacks a rhyme scheme and meter, although it is structured into three-line stanzas, and thus aligns with the free verse style of writing typical of contemporary poets. “Since you ask,” Anne Sexton opens her poem with these threes words, throwing the reader into the middle of a seemingly ordinary conversation (Sexton 1).

Sexton’s poem carried the reoccurring motif of suicide. Through this I felt the importance of this word to her. The poet uses juxtaposition as she creates the word suicide to be beautiful, calling it a ‘drug so sweet’ and an ‘unnamed lust’. I was sympathetic towards her because she felt that suicide was the only escape from her life and her mental illness. Sexton has “taken on his craft, his magic.” The poet’s personification allows us to see the thrill and enchantment of suicide that our poet experiences. It fascinates sexton as it allows her to feel pain; a feeling she finds magical. I was made to feel more sympathetic towards the character as it draws her in without her will, consuming her mind and body. When she feels suicidal she perceives

The novel tells the story of Veronika, a beautiful young woman from Slovenia. Veronika had everything, money, a job, a family, boyfriends, etc. However, she wasn’t happy and she always felt that her life was empty of purpose and that future would be worse, that’s why she decides to suicide by taking many sleeping pills.