First-Person Fiction

There’s a few dynamics going on during this story, however one that is the most prevalent is between the narrator and the rest of her family.  The start of this story makes it clear that there’s favoritism between the oldest and youngest child and it only continues throughout the entire story.  Stella-Rondo threw blame on the narrator several times, typically for her own comment against a family member.  In the end, this happens so much that it drives the narrator to move out of the house and move into where she works at the P.O..  I believe that the narrator believes the story is about her sister, Stella, and her ability to throw things against her.  However, the story is more of the narrator making the final decision to step away from that toxicity.

One thing that really stood out to me was the narrator’s ability to remember all the things she bought and the efficiency of collecting all of her items before moving out.  To me it felt like she was already prepared to make that kind of decision just based on that level of proficiency alone.  That and her witty replies to her family right before she left was very fitting; after all, she knew that they would need to come to the post office if they wanted their mail, and eventually, they would have to, if not for their personal letters and postcards, but for bills and payments.

One thing though was the near instantaneous decision on leaving, even if it was previously planned out.  I also don’t feel like she was given much choice.  The family had made it clear who they stood behind and even if the narrator tried to keep their head low and stay out of the way, it would eventually become too overwhelming and frustrating to deal with.  Especially since it seem like Stella was out to get her older sister.

At the very end of the story the family’s response to the narrator’s departure turned a bit petty.  Turning the entire neighborhood seems a bit much for someone moving out of the house.  However, lies always spread faster than the truth with less effort and a small neighborhood wouldn’t likely have too much going on in terms of news and gossip.  I do applaud the narrator’s ability to ignore the incoming hostility and opinions and merely keep to her own independence, though.

Everyone copes with grief in their own way, and we all discuss it differently as well. Amy Hempel certainly shows this with her narrator and the writing style of this story. Given the fact the narrator must watch her best friend die, you would think there would be emotional scenes and long dialogues. However, this story has none of those elements. Instead, the language is sparse, with the majority of the dialogue kept to facts told by the narrator. The story itself is told in block paragraphs, and the sentences themselves are short. The language seems to be minimalistic and told in a way that suggests a slight impersonal tone. However, as the narrator says, “the impersonal…is more intimate (30).” Keeping a distance from pain is a way to deal with grief.

Amy Hempel

The narrator deals with the pain of watching her best friend die and the helplessness she feels to stop it. The narrator tells us it was two months before she visited her friend in the hospital; she was afraid to watch her best friend die. As she says,

“The best I can explain it is this…a man wrecked his car on 101 going south. But he did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the wet bone—and when he looked at it—it scared him to death. I mean, he died. So I hadn’t dared to look any closer. But now I’m doing it—and hoping that I will live through  it (31).”

She didn’t know if she could handle pain or bare the sight of her best friend’s slow death.

Both the narrator and her best friend avoid directly talking about the inevitable. They make jokes with each other and talk of trivia and friends, but every so often we get a glimpse of the pain and grief the narrator feels. On page 34, she says,

“Was I the only one who noticed that the experts had stopped saying if and now spoke of when? I wanted her to be afraid with me. But she said, “I don’t know. I’m just not…I see fear in her now, and am not going to try to talk her out of it. She is right to be afraid.”

The emotional state of the narrator is clearer when she refuses to spend the night in the hospital with her friend. The following passage clearly articulates this:

 “She thought I meant home to her house in the canyon, and I had to say No, home home. I twisted my hands in the time-honored fashion of people in pain. I was supposed to offer something. The Best Friend. I could not even offer to come back.

I felt weak and small and failed (38).”

Amy Hempel writes an incredibly moving story of grief, the inevitability of death, and the ways in which we deal with the loss. Her narrator still feels deep pain and conveys this grief in seven short pages, but those pages carry a wealth of emotion. Death is, after all, a part of life, and Amy shows just one of the ways we talk about it.

Throughout the duration of the story, I was wondering just how much time had passed between when the narrator was writing about her Fourth of July experience and the “current” time she was legitimately telling it. So, whenever it blatantly said on the last page that it had only been five days and nights, that caught my attention. While we’ve discussed in class how any first-person fiction story is going to have an unreliable narrator, considering how recent the events took place before she ended up writing about how she inevitably ended up living at the PO, this seems to be one of the most reliable relays of events that we’ve read so far. 

For a majority of the story, the narrator has this sense of helplessness, and that isn’t for lack of trying. She does her best to stand up for herself, like whenever her little sister accuses her of saying that her grandfather should cut off his beard, or how her little sister also said that the narrator had unmistakably made a comment about how dumb her uncle looked in the kimono he was wearing. Everyone in the story seems convinced that the narrator is jealous of her sister, when in reality the narrator only thinks of her as spoiled and dramatic. There’s a bit of angst that she has for Stella taking Mr. Whitaker, but she herself said that, “I knew him first. I said from the beginning he’d up and leave her.” For all of the family thinking that she wasn’t smart, the narrator was really observant about everyone around her. 

The main shift happened whenever the whole house turned against her, that her pride still mattered, and she packed everything up and left. The narrator had a meticulous memory of everything that she paid for, or paid the most for, what she took care of, the things that she made, and hardly even said a goodbye to anyone. She made it extraordinarily clear where she stood, where they could find her, and what she planned to do. Her finally taking agency was extremely gratifying, and I can’t speak for everyone who read the final few pages, but she voiced almost everything that I had been thinking. She pointed out how they were shooting themselves in the foot by claiming they’ll never go to the post office because what if Stella wanted to beg for Mr. Whitaker to take her back? Whenever her uncle made a comment about peace and quiet, she didn’t lie down and take it, she essentially said that was rich coming from him considering he set off firecrackers in her room at 6:30 am. Everything came together, and despite it being less than a week since that all had happened, it was nice to see the narrator feeling settled in her new home.

When reading this story, one has to be prepared for a non-linear timeline. In the beginning, the other person (referred to only as ‘she’) requests that the narrator tell her trivia, things she ‘won’t mind forgetting.’ By the second page, the narrator is revealed to be the Best Friend, and they are in a hospital (a supposedly glamorous one in California). The narrator’s friend asks her about the different stages of grief (asking what comes after Denial), which foreshadows impending death. This foreshadowing is further cemented when the friend (who seems to have a morbid sense of humor) makes a sort of play-noose with a phone cord. The narrator has stayed with her friend long enough to discern some of the hospital staff, such as the Good Doctor versus the Bad Doctor.

The narrator often goes off on tangents that initially seem to have no connection to what she is going through with her friend in the hospital. Talking about a chimp who knew sign language, things that seem dangerous turning out not to be and vice versa. The narrator is a nervous person, afraid of flying and earthquakes, while the friend in the hospital is fearless. When an earthquake happened while they were together in college, the friend merely served mimosas and joked about living in Kansas while the narrator’s pulse was still ‘jabbering.’ However, while they are in the hospital while the narrator is telling the story, the narrator sees fear in her friend when an earthquake strikes. 

When the narrator finally tells her friend that she has to go back to her true home, she feels guilty for having to leave her despite being the ‘Best Friend.’ The narrator’s friend wordlessly leaves her room, despite her earlier mention that she couldn’t even get out of bed, and as she leaves, she is clearly short on breath. The nurses go after her. When the narrator finds them, they are in a closet, on the floor with her friend, soothing her while also providing an oxygen mask. The friend passes away at an unspecified time and she is moved to the cemetery where Al Jolson is buried. Strangely (or perhaps not) the narrator enrolls in a ‘fear of flying’ class on the morning of the funeral. By the end, she circles back around to her story of the chimp who knew sign language, and how that chimp had so simply yet powerfully expressed her grief when her baby died. By the end, the narrator’s fixation on morbidity, on dangerous versus not dangerous things, on aspects of fear and life in California, makes sense.

This story features a young woman’s troubles that led her to leave her family behind. The narrator tells this story, beginning with her sister’s return home, more accurately, thinking about how fine life had been before her sister returned. We learned that she is the older sister born exactly a year before her sister, Stella-Rondo, who had married a man and left for a short time then returned home with a child in tow. The narrator seemed to be imagining an audience, and I am led to believe that, since living at the P.O. where mail is handled, the narrator may very well be writing a letter or postcard to someone. The narrator has since left her family’s home and moved to the P.O., and she states that had been the last time she saw her family, “or my family laid eyes on me for five solid days and nights” (p 104), which sounds as though it has only been about five to six days from the argument they all had, which explains how all the details are so rich and clear. At the same time, the neighborhood and town has divided between her and her family, which could mean more time than that had passed. I don’t think it’s been more than a year though. I believe we gather the sense of the narrator’s point at the beginning being that the title leads us to believe she lived at the P.O. and if she starts with her family, then she’s about to tell the story of what happened to cause her to leave. However, at the end is where we know for sure she’s looking back on the experience and learn that she may not have grown much at all since she had left home.

I feel as though the narrator knows this story is about her; I think that’s why she tells us this story. She tells this story as a “Can you believe this bull crap?” She did point fingers and marked her sister down, explaining that her sister was lying to everyone and turning everyone against the narrator. It seems as if she had, at a few points, believed the story is about her sister, as with the end where she assumes Stella-Rondo is telling lies about Mr. Whitaker, but she turns it back to say she only leads to her own conclusions. She makes it known that she isn’t falling for any tricks or lies that will come out of her sister’s, or anyone else in her family, mouth.

I understand that most first person narrations have unreliable narrators, so many of which are biased, young, or simply uninformed. I truly believe that the narrator doesn’t understand her sister, and may never understand her. Despite there is a sense of shame from Stella-Rondo, that the narrator picks up regarding the child, she doesn’t understand why Stella-Rondo would lie so carelessly and even attack her–turning everyone against her to the point she leaves. The narrator also doesn’t understand the rest of her family and why they’re so quick to take on Stella-Rondo’s side, she doesn’t understand any of them but truly sees her sister is out to get her.

I think this story, as I mentioned early, is told more so as a self-defense story along the lines of “Can you believe this crap?” She can’t figure out why they all turned on her other than for the lies Stella-Rondo had told. What could the narrator have done to make them all trust her less than Stella-Rondo, or is it that she is merely just someone everyone takes their problems out on for no good reason? I would certainly say that the narrator is envious and angry throughout her story. The narrator was jealous of her sister for taking Mr. Whitaker, always getting her way, and getting everything handed to her when she always dropped it without a good reason. The narrator was upset that Stella-Rondo had things handed to her on a silver platter but hits it and spills everything all over the place, leaving nothing good for anyone else. She had tried being tender with her family, but as they started turning on her, she made them look less and less pleasing. I think the narrator changed her tone throughout the story. She began with a soft, caring voice — maybe almost happy as she recalled times before her sister returned — about her mother, grandfather, and uncle. The narrator tried not to disrespect her family, despite her sister made it out that she was disrespectful. All the narrator did was try to speak up about things she found needed to be talked about and stood up for herself, but they all turned regardless of how hard she tried. She ultimately wiped her hands of them, and she took what was gifted to her and what she spent more time and money in than the others in her family. Telling this story was meaningful to the narrator, I find, because it’s her growing up and getting out of a toxic situation and family. It was the start of her next chapter in life by the end of a bad one. It was her way of remembering what they did to her and to never forget it.

I loved this story. Its casual depiction of how mental illness is not just people in straight jackets but also an educated high school chemistry teacher is so well put together. It highlights uncharacteristic symptoms of a man grappling with the purpose of life in ways that most people still see as “healthy” or “productive”

The story begins with the father returning home from a mental institution as a “pale and distorted” version of his earlier self. From here, we see how the treatment has affected this man. He seems adamant to neglect his prescriptions and abide by his treatments. This has a more powerful impact when you realize he is a chemistry teacher who understand the ramifications of a “chemical imbalance” in the brain. He would rather suffer with his illness than become a shell of man hazing through life. So he “masks” his illness to seem a productive member of the community.

His lack of medication ultimately takes a toll on him. There is very little information on his mental illness and its effect on his mind other than that it inhibits everyday function and comes with some undesired form of “despair.” He is still seen “getting out of bed” every summer morning to attend class and regaining his “sense of humor.” Despite this you can still see depictions of his deteriorating mental health. He begins to have manic outbursts. Picking up time-consuming hobbies, hyper focusing on responsibilities, making drastic life changes. These are all mania induced actions caused by his later stated “dissatisfaction” with life. He is also seen to have private breakdowns ceremoniously throughout the day.

The only person who saw the absurdity in his actions was his son. His son desperately wanted to understand his father. Why did he change faiths? Why did he want to see the ugly murky world hidden below the water? I think eventually the son understood. Whether this was an indication of the mental illness being passed on as the father indicated earlier in the story or just a deeper understanding of mental struggles is left up for interpretation. I thought him recalling a sentence from the coroner summed up his final understanding of his father, “People do strange things like that all the time when they’re dying.” I believe the son recognizes all of his fathers rash behavior as ways to keep from dying. This line carries so much weight as it rationalizes the dads mental illness to us in a way that we have searched for the whole passage. I believe this line is what truly stuck with the son as he came to terms with his fathers illnesses and death.

All I know is the ending scene of the son attending the lake house alone and letting himself fall into the thoughts of his father under the water was astonishing. His last thoughts echoing over the landscape, “My father pulling off the mask was something more-a gesture of astonishment at what he drifted towards.”

I’ve probably read “Chemistry” ten times now. I first read it in the ENCW 101 in 2019 and since then I’ve felt compelled to revisit it every couple of months. I spent a lot of my childhood summers in Cleveland County, NC (where Joel’s father goes to see snakes), and I appreciate Rash’s attendance to place in this story. More than the geography itself, the feeling of this region is captured in the conflict between Joel’s parents: teetering just on the edge of the mountains, there’s a choice between Appalachian life and something more “civilized.” Appalachia has a somewhat insular culture, including fervent religious traditions, that are difficult to find other places. (My own father spent a lot of my upbringing with similar complaints to Paul about lack of passion in “yankee” services.) I don’t think any of us, except Joel and maybe his mother, could blame the man for trying to get back to his roots in the aftermath of a significant mental episode, especially if, as the story seems to imply, he’s never truly given up his Pentecostal ways.

Every time I read this there’s a line I kind of trip over. “That spring my allegiances were with my mother.” (25) It’s unclear how far in the future Joel is to be telling this story, but we can tell from this one line that it’s far enough in the future for him to have changed his mind. As a teenager, he couldn’t help but be concerned about his dad’s rejection of doctor’s orders following such a crisis, and he was doing what he thought was best at the time. Now, though, he can understand more fully his father’s perspective. For a while, I believed this change was a latent reaction to seeing the congregation of snake handlers, but I realized that really, it was in the aftermath of his father’s death that he began to really understand it all, perhaps falling into a similar depression as Paul had, as implied on page 36. No matter the cause, the change in Joel came too late for the two of them to have a mutual understanding. I believe that the telling of this story is an attempt to remedy this, and to provide someone else with the nuanced perspective on a difficult situation our narrator was unable to share while it was happening.

The narrator of this story, Charlene is a woman from a rural area in Virginia. Longing to leave her past behind, she heads to college in hopes of creating a new identity for herself. Charlene ends up engaging in a lot of social events with different boys with her friends. The culture at the time was that women went to college to find a husband. This is greatly enhanced when her friend, Melissa talks about how she wants to move in with her boyfriend and get pregnant. Throughout the story, Charlene is struggling to come to terms with who she is as a person as well as trying to fit in with her friends. In the end, she goes on to graduate school for writing after she starts accepting her past and writing about her hometown and her family, overcoming her own prejudices about where she came from.

Charlene is surrounded by college friends and hanging out with boys, even going so far as to hook up with one of her professors (disgusting). Despite all of this, she can be interpreted as a person who is grieving. Not necessarily for the death of someone but for the death of herself. By trying to cut off who she was and where she came from, she was isolating herself and it was affecting her work. As a result, she only writes about experiences that have never happened to her, ignoring her teacher’s advice to “write what you know.”

Part of her depression is reflected in how the way she sees her family. In the beginning, she states that she never knew how her parents got together and had her indicating that her family was probably a bit dysfunctional. This is also hinted at when she describes how when her mother would have her nervous breakdowns, her dad would send her mom to the hospital and she would be sent to stay with an aunt. With a dysfunctional family back home, she feels ashamed and detached from her family. In her grief, she tries to console herself by hooking up with her professor to feel relief from her pain. The professor though shuts their relationship down later as he is married and his wife is pregnant.

During the story, she makes up a character named “Bubba” who is supposed to be her cool, older brother who is a “bad boy” but also extremely smart. Through making up this character and building him up as a real person to her friends, she is venting her own personal feelings and desires onto this fictional character. Bubba is the person Charlene wants to be but cannot be due to her situation in life. This changes after her professor, Dr. Pierce, says that they cannot be together during the summer before her senior year. What also ends up happening is that Charlene stops projecting onto Bubba, going so far as to say he died while trying to save a child in a lake to her friends. By telling her friends that he is dead, she no longer has to go on lying. With her affair and Bubba behind her, she finally begins to reveal her true self in her writing which allows her to graduate college and go on to graduate school. However, she never told her friends that Bubba was not real, even after college.

When we talked about “The Liar” in class JGB made sure to let us know that to write is to lie and to lie is to write. James, in “The Liar”  spends his time weaving intricate falsehoods to entertain and capture the attention of those around him. He can’t quite place why he is doing it, but it’s cathartic for him, a way of coping after the passing of his father. At the surface, this can seem nearly identical to “The Bubba Stories.” Charlene makes up Bubba as her way of having something “happen” to her. She also creates vastly intricate tales about a brother who doesn’t exist. It holds the attention of her friends and gives her a chance to create a story worth listening to. Both of these stories seem to be about kids lost in life, filling up what they don’t understand with lies. This isn’t entirely incorrect, but when it comes to “The Bubba Stories,” just isn’t the full story.

“The Bubba Stories” is a coming of age tale. It’s a story about learning to accept yourself for who you are and what your past made you. Charlene, entering college, had a deep desire to reinvent herself. She had an image of what she wanted to be: a french writer with a mysterious background. She made it clear that she desired to become a completely new person, she copied the mannerism of her roommate, she told listeners she had no future planned with her high school boyfriend. She strove to lose her virginity, convinced it would change her in some dramatic way, that it was necessary for her writer’s dream. Bubba was simply the manifestation of these refusals to accept herself. By creating him she was able to make, and control, a narrative around her life. Throughout the story she insists that nothing had ever happened to her, so she created Bubba. I’m sure, in part, this is true, but even just taking a glance at the rest of her family it was clear she had plenty to talk about. She had an intense mother, a party aunt, an uncle with Down syndrome, and a father she didn’t really understand. She had had plenty of things happen to her, but nothing she feels is good enough, trendy enough, to be shared with her closest friends. Therefore, Bubba was not a way to “make things happen to her” but instead a way to continually reinvent herself into the person she wanted to be, or be seen as.

Throughout the short story, Charlene writes awful pieces. She cannot maintain a good grade in her writing class; she can’t write anything of substance. It’s not until she finally writes about her home life,  letting go of the image she was trying to project, that she produces meaningful work. It’s when she finally lets Bubba go, letting go of the mirage of herself, that she comes to her full potential.

When the story opens, we already know Joel’s dad is mentally ill. He spends three weeks in the hospital, he’s given two bottles of medication for it, and he received electroshock therapy before the story started. The disorder is never given, but we’re told it has some aspect of despair to it. But in the writing itself, it’s hard to see the father as mentally ill. We’re told multiple times that he is, but the man doesn’t seem debilitated by it. Not the extent that would need electroshock treatment. It’s a rare treatment for bipolar and schizophrenia nowadays, and it wasn’t all that common in 2000 either; Dr. Morris wouldn’t have used it if it wasn’t necessary to help stabilize him. But since Joel’s dad doesn’t seem to think it worked, and he doesn’t seem different to Joel, it’s interesting that he never actually seems to show signs of illness. He returns to his Pentecostal roots, which clearly upsets his wife, and he starts scuba diving again. When he returns to work, he doesn’t seem particularly unstable or unable to care for himself. The story’s fixation on his illness regardless could be part of Joel’s narration. Joel is worried about his dad, that he might get sick again, which I think motivates him to follow his father to church. And since Joel doesn’t understand much about his dad’s illness, it makes sense that he’d be concerned about his dad’s behavior.

The story also contains a lot of parallels. Joel’s father starts scuba diving again, and he has half an hour’s worth of oxygen in his air tank. Before his hospitalization, he was found crying and clutching a model of the oxygen atom. Similarly, he has a chemical imbalance in his brain, “too much salt”, which he fears he might have passed on to his son. Not taking the prescribed medication wouldn’t have helped. Joel sneaks into his father’s church, though, and sees him receive the oil to be cleansed and healed. The priest pulls out a snake, though we never learn what he does with it. The coroner claims that the rapture of the deep can give a mesmerizing effect when it fills the brain with excess nitrogen. It makes you wonder about the very end: when Joel’s father pulled off his mask in the depths of the reservoir, was he seeking that balance?

A common theme the author makes use of throughout this story that particularly stuck with me was the use of hidden or lost things. The author seems to conceal what exact illness the father is suffering from in this story, only that he was told he has a chemical imbalance in his brain by his doctor. This illness is not enough to stop the narrators’ father from doing what he loves and diving at the lake house, but it was obviously a pivotal point in his life due to the shock therapy he underwent and that he needed to be institutionalized for it as well. The hidden facets of the fathers’ life that come to light later in the story put our perspective firmly into the shoes of the narrator, who is a young adolescent that has only a basic understanding of the world.

Another item of note that is concealed in this story is what kind of relationship the narrators’ parents have with each other. The disagreement they have over which church to attend and the arguments over the father taking his medication lead us to believe that they do not get along in the same way as they used to, but the author withholds the explanation why from us. Overall, the author does a very efficient job at progressing the story without revealing certain details, and that makes this story even richer and more accurate because it is being recounted by a child, and children tend to have very narrow perspectives. I thought the sentence, “Each time I entered the water my foreboding increased, not chest-tightening panic but a growing certainty that many things in the world were better left hidden,” (p. 29) summarized this theme of vagueness that the author applied so well. I also believe that the depth and mysterious nature of the lake the narrators’ father would go diving in provided a very accurate mirror of the human mind, and perhaps even the fathers’ mind. When shock therapy was used as a scientific treatment for mental illness, we had only a superficial understanding of the human mind and how it worked. To this effect, when the narrator describes being underwater and how they could barely see a few feet ahead, they were just on the surface of all the things that could be discovered in the lake. The infinite amount of things to be discovered and explored in the lake was overwhelming for the narrator, but for his father it seemed to be an escape, a way for him to explain the unexplainable. Perhaps he thought that if he dove deep enough, he would find the solution to his illness among all the other hidden things.

The story “Chemistry” is told from the perspective of Joel who is watching his father change due to mental illness. While this story does address the father it also goes into Joels’s complex relationship with his parents as well as Joel’s own mental state.

Throughout the story, we see the two parental figures in the story fight over idealistic differences. These issues are things such as whether or not to medicate or the validity of certain religious branches. While the matter of medication is mostly kept between the parent’s many other disagreements force Joel to take a side. One example of conflict Joel finds themselves in the middle of is the debate over their parent’s religious affiliations. While in this case, his mother does make the decision for him it nonetheless forces him to take a side. This signals a clear divide between Joel’s mother and father metaphorically but also literally. At the end of the argument, we see his mother and father’s cars going in different directions, symbolizing their different ideals. By taking away Joel’s choice this leaves him feeling powerless within his own homelife environment. However, this is not the only instance of this, it can be seen again when Joel’s mother asks him to watch his father during school hours. This puts Joel in a vulnerable position as he does not want to say no to his mother, but he also does not want to work against his father. This creates a feeling of isolation within the character, one which is very similar to feelings his father is grappling with.

This is not the only time we see similarities between Joel and his father. In fact, the first time Joel is given a choice he sides with his father. This being the issue of whether to dive at the lake. This is not pleasing to Joel’s mother which once again puts him in a position of having to pick between his parents.  Yet it is not his mother’s discomfort that discourages him to eventually stop diving,  instead, it is the discomfort of knowing too much about the unknown. This can be seen in the following excerpt

“ Each time I entered the water my foreboding increased, not chest-tightening panic but a growing certainty that many things in the world were better left hidden. By August I’d joined my mother on the porch, playing board games and drinking iced tea as my father disappeared off the doc toward mysteries I no longer wished to fathom.” ( Rash 29)

Joel does not want to see what is below the surface of the reality he lives in. He is comfortable with the mental state he is currently in and does not want to dive deep down into his own thoughts.  This is similar to his father’s doctor advising his father to find something “To keep his mind off his mind.” ( Rash 24 ). Both Joel and his father grapple with the fact darkness exists below the surface. For his father, this is the fear of his mental illness, which is what drives him to a church associated with his childhood domination. This church is his father’s way to retreat into his childhood, relying on the familiar place to distract him from what he fears most. We see this retreat into childhood with Joel as well when he chooses to sit with his mother instead of diving. Like the Pentecostal Church, the mother provides a sense of safety and familiarity. Yet we see Joel battle with this as he clearly wants to spend time with his father or at a minimum understand him. When Joel follows his father to church, we see him looking for answers but as soon as it gets to be too much for him, he turns away. This is similar to his father’s inability to talk openly about his mental illness. In the end, his father does talk to him about why he comes to the church, explaining he is looking for understanding. However, Joel doesn’t seem to understand his father’s intention and feels too afraid to press for more information. He is afraid to learn the truth because it could potentially be painful. This suppressing of thoughts and fear of the unknown is a uniting factor between Joel and his father.

The final parallel we see with Joel and his father takes place during his father’s funeral. The congregation of his father’s church are in attendance representing a chance to learn more about who his father really was. Joel does not take advantage of this opportunity and never seeks them out. Because of this Joel loses not only understanding about his father but understanding about himself.

At the end of the story, we see Joel sitting at the lake house, contemplating what happened. We see Joel ponder if his father would have willingly taken off his mask. This thought is scary to him not only because it means his father might have left on purpose but because it also means he is capable of the same. Joel knows he is similar to his father and because of this knows the same mental illness could be in him. This was even brought up by his father as he says “I hope you never do “ my father says softly, but “ from what the doctors at Broughton told me there’s a chance you will.” (Rash 36 )

In the end, this is a story about the similarity between Joel and his father and the fears such similarity can bring.

At the beginning of the story, something almost immediately noticeable is that the narrator, Joel, doesn’t state what exactly happened to his father to land him in the hospital. However, when the doctor says the phrase, ‘to keep his mind off his mind’ it suddenly becomes obvious that the father has some sort of mental illness. Furthermore, he refuses to believe that he has a mental illness, as he claims that if he takes his prescription medicine, ‘he’ll be too muddled to find the classroom.’ This seems to be a fairly common occurrence in older men with more prevalent mental issues, denying that they have any such affliction. In doing so, they surrender their family to watch as their behavior becomes more and more abnormal (and a lot of times, self-destructive), all the while denying that there is anything wrong. Even when they are trained in a science that advocates taking medical supplements when finding oneself with a deficiency.

Over the course of the story, it becomes clear that there is a change overtaking the father, for example changing church affiliation and wearing scuba gear around the house. At one point, Joel follows his father and watches what his ‘church’ does. They engage in a strange ritual, that includes the pastor holding a disgruntled rattlesnake and Joel’s father speaking in a strange tongue. Joel’s father meets with him afterwards and tries to convey why he chooses to go to church instead of following the medical treatments recommended to him. Joel remains unable to understand, and his father tells him that he hopes Joel never does. However, he eerily mentions that the doctor at the hospital had hinted that Joel may be subject to the same type of depression as him some time in the future. For some reason, Joel never tells his mother about his venture. Perhaps out of respect for his father’s privacy. Or perhaps because Joel doesn’t want his mother to start worrying about him as well.

Towards the end of the story, after Joel’s father passes away, Joel continues to venture down to the lake house where the death occurred. He and his mother were told that because of nitrogen narcosis, his father removed his mask while deep underwater. Joel contemplating whether or not this was actually the case–whether or not it was actually planned on his father’s part–may indicate that he is beginning to understand his father’s thought process.

This story focuses a lot on ideas like mental health, loss, grief, and perhaps even nirvana. I say nirvana because I felt as if the father was trying to rid himself of all suffering. He tried this with medications and realized they were not going to work. After this, he tried reconverting to the religion he was a part of before his marriage. Finally, he chose to end his life. His death could have been an accident, but I think that he meant for it to happen. “Chemistry” shows a struggle between the father and the mother. The son seems to be in the middle of this.

Morris’ attention to detail was really prevalent in this short story. Morris has the narrator use very detailed imagery to describe the people of Pirates Cove and the beach itself. Everything in the first couple of paragraphs was very descriptive and imagery based and I think for a short story it’s always helpful when the author is able to immediately pull its readers into the world they are writing about. The entire story is sort of built on detailed imagery.

Josh was so consumed by how much everyone on the beach obsessed over him that he only saw Mrs. Lovenhiem as another admirer. The way he wasn’t able to sit alone in his lifeguard chair without having girls swarm him just added to his ego and made him think he was on top of Pirates Cove. He was so absorbed in the fact that Mrs. Lovehiem didn’t treat him the way everyone else on the beach did that he failed to take into account she comes to the beach to lounge not to gawk at the lifeguard on duty.

I think the only issue with the story is the ending, I’d wish there was something Josh had learned about Mrs. Lovenhiem, she continues being a mystery to the reader and narrator even after the story ends

Josh Michael’s arrogance and ego are shattered when he realizes he can’t save the life of a child. He’s the god of the beach, envied by old men, lusted after by young girls; he has everything. But when little Becky Spencer is choking to death, Josh realizes he’s completely helpless and nothing he has can save her. He’s done what he’s been trained to do if someone is drowning, but Becky is choking to death on land, and he has no idea how to save her life. Shouldn’t he, after all? The beach is his kingdom, here he is large and in charge. Ric and Mrs. Spencer even tell him he should know what to do. Instead, Mrs. Lovenheim—the woman who makes him feel superior due to his false belief of her admiration—calmly walks up to Becky and performs the Heimlich maneuver; she does what Josh could not. His inability to save Becky’s life rocks him to the core. What does he really have to offer? He goes to see Mrs. Lovenheim that night to thank her for saving Becky and quickly realizes that she doesn’t recognize him. It’s at this moment that he understands he has nothing, and his composure shatters. His perspective on himself changes, and he never looks at the beach the same way again.

I suppose Mary Morris makes us ask ourselves: What do we truly have to offer if a situation arises like that of Becky Spencer? Because good looks and charm are all well and good, but they are fleeting. Teenagers certainly don’t think of anything but these things because they have had no experience. Josh believes that Mrs. Lovenheim is attracted to him; it is only after Becky’s incident that he sees she was truly just grieving and nursing a broken heart from the loss of her children and her abandonment by her husband. Every teenager at some point in their lives has their illusions shattered. It’s at this moment that every teenager thinks, “Oh, this is life. This is what matters.” The same can be said of adults. Ric spends his time reminiscing with Josh about his former days as a lifeguard, and his feelings of being stuck in a life he doesn’t want. His daughter almost dying changes his perspective. Appreciate what you have, because in an instant you could lose something precious. Or in Josh’s case, you realize you have nothing at all.

The story, originally describing a lifeguard stud attracting the attention of dozens of girls, later turns into a story of tragic accidents and coming to terms with ones actions, as well as how it influences people afterwards.  There are quite a few things going on, especially towards the start, and the majority of them didn’t get solved until the end.

One of the first things you learn about Pirate’s Point is that Josh has been a lifeguard for several years and that this was his last summer before moving to college.  In addition to that, it became very clear that Joe was a typically chick magnet, thriving off the attention that these teenage girls give him.  He even states that he looks at girls bare stomaches and looking down their bikini tops from his lifeguard stand.

However, he does use this to his own advantage when he asks Peggy Mandel out on date, only to ask her more about her brother’s drowning at the same beach for “lifeguard purposes.”  He pushes her despite her obvious and clearly communicated discomfort on the topic to the point she asks him to take her back home.  The next day, a different girl, Cindy, strives for Josh’s attention and a date only for Peggy to step in and brought up her own date.  The brief interaction, as well as Cindy climbing up onto his lifeguard stand, caused enough distraction for what was believed to be a drowning.  Becky had choked on a grape, and despite Josh’s best efforts, he couldn’t dislodge it.  Mrs. Lovenhiem then step in and helped, quickly removing the stuck grape, much to the surprise from everyone watching.

While it’s not explicitly talked about, the ending holds subtle tones of traumatic experiences or maybe some slight PTSD.  Josh ends the final paragraph with the line “…and I’ve never seen the water or the umbrellas of summer in the same way again”, specifically talking about the near-fatal experience with Becky and his inability to help, despite executing everything he’s been trained to do.  That helplessness lingers in his mind even years later and the beach and ocean waves only bring up those memories of what he used to be.

It was really interesting for me to watch Josh and his behavior throughout the entire story.  He starts off as quite the womanizer, and that was something that particularly irked me, but by the end of the story he didn’t seem to have further interest.  In fact, at the end he sought the attention of widow Mrs. Lovenhiem, who he only really spoke to a few given times, despite their daily interactions at the beach.  Even after that last interaction at her house, what she had done lingered in his mind forever.