First-Person Fiction

Ottessa Moshfegh dose a brilliant job of combining both repulsion and intrigue through her character development. In this short story she seems to capture the apparition of a mans true innermost nature.The main character, and our narrator, seems to have an overzealous ego as he practically drowns the text in his own self worship.He uses words such as “refined” and “wonderful” to describe his own social standing while putting down the other people in his life.You very quickly find out that these self righteous parables he seems to go on about are nothing but true as he begins to disclose facts about his earlier life and his desires.These consisting of sleeping with his friends girlfriend, breaking into peoples houses as a child and violating their privacy, longing for a primitive “wonton” sexual interaction, and eventually cheating on his wife through an act of sodomy.
You are given a man who is self depicted as elegant and moralistically inclined but as he opens up his inner most thoughts you see the unreliability of the narrators own self image. His thoughts show his own self hated longing for unethical and even “fitly” acts as he calls them. He deplores other people, like his brother MJ, who are free to be disgusting as there is no stress or fear of judgment from others while you are in MJ’s position. He longs to enjoy the primal aspects of life and craves to be disgusted by his actions but is held back by the condemnation of others. In one part he thinks of his son as he is crying over his[the narrator] grave and how his son would tell his grandchildren awful things regarding him. He loathes the idea of being hated as he is a “wonderful” man who is deserving of praise. Despite this deep drive for a clean slated life he craves to be free, to be dirty in the way that others get to be. Even in his thoughts while he is being sodomized he says, “it wasn’t painful, nor was it terrifying, but it was disgusting — just as I’d always hoped it to be.”