Suicide Note Analysis

Many authors write poems to express different types of feeling such as happiness, sadness, or judgment. In these poems the authors talk about being judge, and criticize and how they dealt with their struggles. Many people cope differently as we will see in, “Barbie Doll”, “David Talamantez on the Las Day of Second Grade” and the “Suicide Note”.

In the poem “Suicide Note” by Janice Mirikitani, reveals her disappointment of her inability to rise to her parents standards, which becomes too much for her and she takes away her life. You see the speakers disappoint when she states, “dear mother and father/ I apologize/ I’ve worked very hard, /not good enough/ harder, perhaps to please you/ if only I were a son,” (4-10). This uncover how she is feeling how whatever she does is not good enough for her parents because she is not what they wanted, a son. As the poem continues the poem displays the way the speaker copes with it, when she states “I make this ledge my altar/to offer penance…on my broken body/cover me like whisper of sorries /sorries” (42-43, 52-54). This shows how the speaker could not cope and the only way she found to make her failures go away, was to kill herself.

In the poem by Margie Piercy, “Barbie Doll” shows how the pressure and the views of other effect how one views themselves, which

“Write large, his teacher says/ in red ink across the tops of many pages. Messy! She says” (24-25) David is repetitively showed what he cannot do things right. As the poem continues we see how he copes, “On every single page David Talamantez has crossed/ out the teachers red numbers/ and written in giant letters, blue ink, yes! David, yes!” (57-59). David self-motivates himself and does not allow criticism to bring him down but encourages his to show the teacher he