ipl-logo

Girl Interrupted By Susanna Kasen Analysis

1265 Words6 Pages

“Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?” - A heavy question that is, when you think about it, almost impossible to answer. ‘Girl, Interrupted’ ponders many questions such as this, and although it doesn’t give us all of the answers, it serves as some reassurance, that none of us really know. The narrator, Susanna Kaysen, begins writing with an already complicated chain of events following her. A phone call to her boyfriend to advise him of her impending suicide, leaves her sitting at home, waiting. Although, as I came to realise, in true fashion of this text, it could never be just that simple. Taking 50 aspirin and then remembering you need to pick up milk and heading to the store, is not your usual suicide story. It could even be seen, perhaps, a cry for help? However we are soon divulged her intention through her own explanation. It was not, in fact, a ‘suicide attempt’, but instead, an attempt at “partial suicide” to kill only the part of herself that no longer …show more content…

At first, she felt “Emptiness and boredom: what an understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair, and depression” (157), but she soon grew closer to not only the other patients, but also her nurses. The quick switches between emotions left an uneasy but somewhat ‘real’ feeling to the story, which only succeeded to make the reader chew through pages faster, in a desperate attempt to see where the next page would lead, to see if the next emotion was something we ourselves had also felt. Trying to find some difference, some evidence that she wasn’t exactly like us, that she was truly crazy. Chapters spiral from her being extremely angry about her existence in the “looney bin”, to having hopeful moments; in which she spoke of her thoughts about her the future or about her relationships with friends in

Show More
Related

  • Is The Difference Between Quicksand And The Autobiography Of An Ex-Colored Man

    745 Words  | 3 Pages

    She had not even considered the remote possibility that her aunt's husband might be like Mrs. Nilssen. For the first time in nine days she wished herself back in New York, in America. " She was also distracted by the fact that she might be in love with a doctor but she quickly dismisses that idea with more negative thoughts (With the recollection of that previous flight and subsequent half-questioning a dim disturbing notion came to her. She wasn't, she couldn't be, in love with the man. It was a thought too humiliating, and so quickly dismissed.

    Read More

  • Girl Interrupted Book Report

    511 Words  | 3 Pages

    Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen The book Girl interrupted is a humorous nonfiction Autobiographical book about the author Susanna Kaysen experience in side a mental intuition with others in which she encountered. The story takes place in 1967 Massachusetts inside McLean Hospital. Kaysen, who voluntarily enters a mental institution after visiting her psychiatrist and discovers she is having a problem and offers her a place to “rest”. She plans on staying just a few weeks but ends up stay a total of 18 months were she meets many of other mental ill patients and is later diagnosis with Borderline Personality Disorder.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken

    856 Words  | 4 Pages

    As Helen Keller once quoted, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken tells the life story of Louis “Louie” Zamperini. Through his troubles as a child, emerged a strong-willed Olympic runner, who later became a military aviator. He was lost at sea and then captured by the Japanese as a prisoner of war. He endured years of abuse and suffering but still managed to stay true to who he was.

    Read More

  • Personification In The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    779 Words  | 4 Pages

    The unsatisfying setting that appears around the ill woman unravels an understanding

    Read More

  • Identity In The Yellow Wallpaper

    1008 Words  | 5 Pages

    Being a woman in the early twentieth century, she simply followed what her husband told her. She did not have her own voice and kept her thoughts to herself. With that being said, it is as if her identity is simply that of the average woman during her time. However, the days she spends in confinement go by, the identity of that woman drifts away and she is overtaken by the identity of her own mental illness. As said in Diana Martin’s journal on “Images in Psychiatry”, while the narrator in isolation she becomes “increasingly despondent and nervous”.

    Read More

  • They All Just Went Away Analysis

    1474 Words  | 6 Pages

    Wednesday, October 22 Reading Response 2 “Living Will” by Danielle Ofri is about an author who is a doctor who came across a patient that is suicidal. “They All Just Went Away” by Joyce Carol Oates is about a young lonely girl who finds herself attracted in entering abandoned house and is entranced by other peoples lives and what they left by. Although these stories are very different, I believe both the authors share a similar idea, but different outlooks, of how the main characters in each essay struggle to do the right thing. “Living Will” gives us a better perspective of what doctors today have to face with their jobs. The author, Danielle Ofri, came across a severely ill patient, Wilburn Reston, which really makes her think.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Girl Unprotected By Laura Robinson

    170 Words  | 1 Pages

    In “Girl Unprotected”, Sports writer and journalist Laura Robinson argues that if you examine the Judicial system, then you will find a strong bias against victims of hockey abuses with an emphasis against women. Throughout her essay, Robinson uses the case against Mike Danton and the NHL to emphasize the issues of gender inequality and the lack of recognition to the abuses in hockey. In her essay, Laura Robinson begins her argument by claiming that “women’s bodies were only allowed to be adjectives to describe men” (Robinson 326). By doing so, she suggests that women’s bodies are all that the men in hockey care about while their mind’s and talents are ignored and lack in value. To reinforce her thesis, Robinson also includes a quote from a

    Read More

  • Argumentative Essay-Assisted Suicide

    586 Words  | 3 Pages

    People who committed suicide were in a state of immense despair; they could not see hope and find the courage to go on. They wanted to end their pain. At the same time, they might not realize that they were also being selfish.

    Read More

  • The Yellow Wallpaper Point Of View Analysis

    814 Words  | 4 Pages

    Everything from how her interactions with her family to her perception of her environment and how it evolves throughout the story allow the reader to almost feel what the narrator is feeling as the moves through the story. In the beginning, the only reason the reader knows there may be something wrong with the narrator is because she comes right out and says she may be ill, even though her husband didn’t believe she was (216). As the story moves on, it becomes clear that her illness is not one of a physical nature, but of an emotional or mental one. By telling the story in the narrator’s point of view, the reader can really dive into her mind and almost feel what she’s feeling.

    Read More

  • Theme Of Mental Illness In The Yellow Wallpaper

    562 Words  | 3 Pages

    The reader of this story can tell this woman is not only suffering from insanity, but also loneliness. She often finds herself crying and says, “I cry at nothing, and I cry most of the time.” She attempts to tell her husband how she is feeling but she is unable to, she says “I was crying before I had finished.” (681) the reader can see how this woman is upset and it is not only due to her illness. Infect, the woman makes many comments about how her husband is not reassuring.

    Read More

  • Universal Truth In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper

    650 Words  | 3 Pages

    The narrator is certain she is really sick, and not just nervously depressed as diagnosed by her husband, but she is confined by her role as a wife and woman, and cannot convince her relatives and friends that something is actually wrong with her. In the story the narrator says, “”If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the

    Read More

  • Girl Interrupted Movie Analysis

    881 Words  | 4 Pages

    Girl, Interrupted is a movie that is meant to portray multiple different mental illnesses and how they affect a person’s life along with others. It portrays illnesses that affect mood, eating, and thought processes. At the beginning of the movie, Susanna tried to kill herself with Aspirin and Vodka, but claims she had a headache, and was rushed to the hospital. The therapist she met with 4 days after her incident referred her to Claymoore, a psychiatric hospital, to treat her depression. Right as Susanna moved in, she got cornered by Lisa, because Susanna took her best friends place in the room.

    Read More

  • Psychological Analysis Of The Movie Girl, Interrupted

    1150 Words  | 5 Pages

    Psychoanalysts’ understand human personality through behaviors by looking into experiences, including the origin of emotions, thoughts and behaviors. Through the analysis of the movie Girl, Interrupted, many of the characters behave in all sorts of manners, ranging from being unreasonable, frightened, happy, sad, or disturbed due to their varieties of behaviors. All the characters include different ailments that affect the way they act, respond, and interpret situations. In accordance with personality theories, the movie Girl, Interrupted explores the memoir of a young woman through personality disorders, traits, and humanism during her stay in a McLean psychiatric institution during the 1960’s. Susanna Kaysen, the protagonist, is diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder, due to her attempt at suicide by consuming an entire bottle of alcohol with aspirin.

    Read More

  • Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Gender Roles

    709 Words  | 3 Pages

    In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates, both female protagonists are faced with opposing male forces that seek to control, undermine and take advantage of them. However, in the midst of the challenges and subordination they face from these dominant male figures, each protagonists independence is tested as they both strive to overcome these forces. Connie, the protagonist in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” is a 15 year old, narcissistic teenage girl, searching for independence through her sexuality as she enters into the realm of adulthood. “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home,” (Oates, 1).

    Read More

  • Essay On Suicide Prevention

    1169 Words  | 5 Pages

    Over the years the issue of suicide has been slowly increasing. It is now the third leading cause of death among young people. The effects of suicide are tragic and felt long after the individual has taken their own life. Some people who consider suicide, however, never make a “serious” attempt at it. For every attempted suicide, there is said to be more than one person whose thought of suicide has never translated into an actual attempt.

    Read More

More about Girl Interrupted By Susanna Kasen Analysis

Open Document