My Mortal Enemy Character Analysis

Analysis of My Mortal Enemy

My Mortal Enemy involves the narrator, Nellie, and how she meets Myra when she is just fifteen years old. Then as the story goes on the novel starts to wrap around Myra and her characteristics that develop parts of the plot and eventually the ending. All throughout the story we a side of Myra that was not easily seen by others but in the second part, she starts to show things that nobody ever recognized before. This novel focuses on how your bad side can eventually catch up to you. So what contributes to this? In my data chart, three categories are really important towards the plot, and it sets up a good reasoning behind it. Myra 's insecurities lead her to become her own mortal enemy, and this can most easily be

However, religion shows a side of Myra both good and bad. Within this narrative of part one, Myra ran off with Oswald because they were ‘in love’ but Oswald was the son of an “Ulster Protestant whom John Driscoll detested” (Cather 11). John Driscoll is Myra’s great uncle who she had lived for a big part of her life and they are both Catholic. In part two, religion is mentioned again when Myra had begun to get ill. This is when her insecurities became worse, and she mentions how Oswald had separated her from the Church. So, within religion aspect, Myra faces her insecurities that she was not good enough and that she had messed up her chances of being with the Catholic Church because she had married Oswald. Myra brings up Oswald separating her from the church because she didn’t want to blame herself. At the very end, she had passed with an ebony crucifix in her hands as if it was to redeem herself from being ‘separated from the church’ to show she had been ‘saved’ from her bad side. Plus I think she used religion to somewhat ‘tame’ her mortal enemy and that is why she passed with the crucifix in her hands as a redemption from her mortal enemy that upheld all of her insecurities and