Essay Questions

What deductions can you make about the narrator’s Self-Concept based on her relationship with Trevor after graduation?

The narrator recounts, “After I graduated and was flung into the world of adulthood- already orphaned- I was bolder in my desperation, made frequent appeals to Trevor to take me back. I could hear his cock harden on the phone whenever I called to beg him to come over and hold me…Then he’d be there and I’d shiver in his arms like the child I still was, swoon with gratitude for his recognition, savor the weight of him in the bed next to me. It was as though he were some divine messenger, my soul mate, my savior.” The narrator begs Trevor to be in her life when she is conscious that he is seeing other women. Psychologically, she considers Trevor to be significant in completing the narrator’s her Self. She cannot leave him for she is attached to him (he broke her virginity.) Moreover, Trevor is a parental figure to the narrator; he is the narrator’s Objet Petit a (in the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis) for a father figure considering that she is orphaned. The other men with whom she has flings cannot replace Trevor from her unconscious.

Provide a psychoanalytic explanation of the dynamics between the narrator’s mother and father.

The narrator expounds, “My father was neither an ally nor a confidant, but it seemed backward to me that this hardworking man would be relegated to the sofa when my last mother got the king-size bed… I assume she blamed my father for ruining her life- she got pregnant and drooped out of college to marry him. She didn’t have to, of course. I was born in August 1973, seven months after Roe v. Wade.” The narrator’s mother’s behavior indicates that she is has not overcome the frustration of failing to complete her college studies. Her act of letting her husband sleep on the couch is a form of castigation which she employs so that he can pay for rendering her pregnant. She is egotistical because she does not acknowledge her role in the pregnancy. Psychoanalytically, the mother projects her frustration on her husband which kills the love between them as evidenced in the separate sleeping locations.