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Brittney Grubb

Professor Hall

English 2100

28 Jan 2011

Undeniable Theme of Grief in Hell-Heaven and By-and-By

Common themes being portrayed throughout several particular pieces can often

give those pieces a sense of unity, but individualism as well. In both Amy Bloom’s By-

and-By and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven, there is a shared theme of grief that the reader

can identify based on the personalities and traits given to each of the characters. The grief

experienced by the characters in both of the texts is both relatable and reasonable,

because of its naturalistic plot and realistic derivative. Exploring the symbolism and

effects that these authors portray through their characters and their situations can help

bring about a perspective that would be impossible to achieve any other way.

Most commonly ignored and looked over is the basic story behind the story, so to

speak: the life of the author. Based on the witnessed death of the main character’s best

friend, By-and-By draws immediate sympathy and understanding. Having “worked in a

felafel joint on Charles Street,” as Bloom’s main character did, it’s probable to assume

that she is incorporating her own past experiences or emotions into her story, as she also

“scooped felafel” for a living before her writing career began. Lahiri’s story, Hell-

Heaven, as well, is primarily based on the continuation of life throughout generations,

specifically centered on the differences of various cultures and its emotional effect on the

lives of both children and adults. This draws particular attention to the jealousy

experienced by the main character towards someone born of another culture, which was
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quite possibly inspired by the author’s careful observance of “the cultures of the United

States and India.” Without looking at the authors’ lives when analyzing a text, there are

often key facts being missed that only help to make the text that much more interesting

and whole.

Though both stories incorporated grief in their own manners, the authors explored

two completely different paths in portraying it, both based on human emotions, and both

immediately recognizable in their own way. Bloom, though, had a particular way of

doing so that is quite surprising at first, by using darkness. After a simple first reading of

the story By-and-By, there are three distinguished parts that are not typically incorporated

in the sharing of a tragic event, especially one as sensitive as the loss of a friend. This

particular text makes a special emphasis on the physical death of a body, the stages it

takes for the heart to shut down, and the rigid details that encompass the slow

decomposition of the body after death. The story sets off this mood in the very first few

sentences by its description of the human eye: “Every death is violent. The iris, the

rainbow of the eye, closes down. The pupil spreads out like dark water.” Immediately the

tone of the piece becomes one of sorrow, but the dimension of it is taken even deeper.

The iris is the part of the eye that distinguishes the color of your eye, hence, “the rainbow

of the eye.” Everyone knows that eyes are also black and white surrounding that ring of

color, but people distinguish the color of your eye by that particular piece, that unique

section. All of the color has left this person’s body; all that used to distinguish that person

from others has been emptied from them. They’ve become just another victim of death,

and will decay like every other living body that dies. That imagery is transferred to the

reader as the exact depiction of misery, and expresses just how painful, yet numb, of an
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effect such an event can have on a person. Grief does not have to involve tears, nor is it

limited to certain statements or actions. From the very beginning, the main character

makes certain her story is as sorrowful, or grieving, to the reader as it is to her: that loved

one has passed away and it needs to be understood, right away, how that feels: empty.

Along with darkness is the sense of emptiness that the main character suffers.

Death is interesting, because sympathy is generated the second a person dies, but

sympathy lingers, and transforms to grief, if a lifestyle changes because of that death. It

has a way of continuing, impacting daily life, which is exactly what happened to this

character. “It was exactly due to Anne that I was able to walk through the world like a

normal person.” Because of that statement, it can be understood the message Bloom was

trying to convey through the main character: after gaining understanding about the world

and life within it from Anne, her death caused an intense sense of emptiness. This

absence continues to linger towards the end of the story as the main character consciously

blames Eugene Trask, the rapist and murderer of her best friend, for every death that she

has witnessed or had to deal with in her life, including her father: “My young father, still

slim and handsome and a good dancer, collapsed on our roof trying to straighten our

ancient TV antennae and Eugene Trask pulled his feet out from under him, over the

gutters and thirty feet down.” Trask literally became the icon of grief in her life.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven has a number of conflicts worth considering, each

character having his or her own thoughts and perspectives to consider. Social interactions

and cultural based living are the most notable depictions of grief in this piece. The first,

of which, is romantic relationships. In introducing the characters, Lahiri informs us that

the three Bengalis, Pranab, Boudi, and Usha, are inseparable. Boudi desired this Calcutta
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native’s company because they “confronted each other in a way she and my father never

did” and he “transported my mother back to the world she’d left to marry my father.” Her

sensitivity towards the attention she was receiving from him was a cure to the

unannounced, but heavily evident, grief that she had been experiencing from having lost

the intimate relationship she had once had with her husband, and the freedom from forced

marriage that she had enjoyed before they were married. The lack of love exchanged in

their marriage is again emphasized when Deborah and Prahab became engaged: “by

summer there was a diamond on Deborah’s left hand, something my mother had never

received.”

Boudi may not be the only discontented person in her marriage. Her husband also

shows potential signs in being dissatisfied. It is never stated that he does not love his

wife, but he is pleased with Pranab’s ability to make her happy: “my father was grateful

to Pranab Kaku for the companionship he provided, freed from the responsibility he must

have felt for forcing her to leave India, and relieved, perhaps, to see her happy for a

change.” Undoubtedly, he was miserable in the marriage, having married her just “to

placate his parents.” The author’s careful words, “one might think that he would have felt

slightly jealous…but my guess is that my father was grateful,” though, reminds the reader

that those words are not from his point of view, leaving the reader unsure of the direct

cause of the grief, but affirmed in knowing that he was encountering it; this was possibly,

but not indefinitely, because of the very fact that he was forced to be married. This was

made even more apparent once it is taken into consideration how insistent he was to not

tell Prahab that his parents would disown him if he married an American woman. One

must truly analyze the reasoning behind his concern for him if he is to discover the
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underlying bond he had with him, even though he didn’t know him. Living a troubled

marriage, the only reason for refusal to admit hard truths to him is to save him from

calling off the marriage and marrying the woman his parents had assigned to him back in

Calcutta, thus making the same mistake he had many years ago in marrying Boudi. Other,

more obvious, relational problems arose as well. Prahab’s marriage to Deborah, which

the mother never approved of, due to her being an American and, more primarily, that she

would live a happy marriage with the man that Boudi had fallen in love with.

The main character, as well, had an interest in Deborah because her lifestyle

consisted of freedom, something the Bengalis never received, and because she gave her

“the sorts of gifts my parents had neither the money nor the inspiration to buy.” The

mother now has three immediate losses, the ongoing loss, if it can be counted as such, of

her husband’s love, her daughter’s affection, which was now shifted to Deborah, and

Prahab in his entirety, who completely departs from her life. By the main character’s

teenage years, Boudi had infected her daughter with the aftermath of her grieving over

the loss of Prahab. Becoming bitter towards her mother, she sets off to make her own

decisions for herself, even with her mother’s disapproval, and with as harsh of words as

were necessary to get her way: “When she screamed at me for talking too long on the

telephone, or for staying too long in my room, I learned to scream back, telling her that

she was pathetic, that she knew nothing about me, and it was clear to us both that I had

stopped needing her, definitively and abruptly, just as Pranab Kaku had.” This inevitably

led to the same fate for her daughter as she had lived. “It was to me that she confessed,

after my own heart was broken by a man I’d hoped to marry.”


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While both stories have unique approaches to this vast human emotion, they do

settle on one particular agreement as to how it affects people. Both of the stories portray

the continuation of grief through multiple generations, based on lifestyle, and the result it

has on the decisions made by individuals throughout their early stages of maturity and

growth, through to their adulthood. Taking the focus off of the main character in By-and-

By, attention should be redirected to other characters as well. This is especially so, in this

case, with the antagonist, Eugene Trask. Because of the point of view in this story,

Eugene is given little to no attention or consideration as to the reasoning behind his

actions. With a closer look, though, it becomes obvious that his childhood played an

important role in his adulthood. Like in Hell-Heaven, where the main character’s mother

lost the man she loved, though he just became absent in her life instead of dying, the

same happens with Eugene, as he loses a close personal connection to his father at a

young age due to his bed-wetting problem: “he knew his way around the woods because

their father threw him out of the house naked, in the middle of the night, whenever he wet

his bed, which he did all his life.” His grieving over the desire for his father’s affection

led to his need, or so it seemed to him, to rape women, to fulfill that void of love with the

forced affection of others, since he could never force his father into feeding that need in

his childhood. This, in turn, caused grief of others in his adulthood, because of the acts

that he committed.

Grief, as an overall theme, runs rapid through the emotions and actions of

characters portrayed by both Lahiri and Bloom. They both, however, have a unique

means of forcing the reader to pay careful attention to the things not said, the actions not

made, and the events that didn’t happen. The most prominent and identifiable details in
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both stories to the main theme are found in the complete lack of direct expression of it,

but instead in emotional assumptions made by the reader.

Works cited?

Brittany,

On p. 4, you allude to a tantalizing idea—that grief resulting from a violent death may not
be so very different from grief resulting from disappointed love. That may suggest a
central idea for your revised essay. To give your essay a clear FOCUS, that’s what I
want you to work on first.

Without a clear sense of a central idea—a main point you want to make about the
meaning of grief in these two stories—your essay is difficult to follow. In revision, work
on articulating that central idea. Then name 3-4 key points that help you to develop that
central idea. Once you’ve done that, come let’s talk about how to arrange your main
ideas in some logical order.

To be effective, your revision will need to demonstrate the conventions of writing about
literature we’ve discussed in class. Study these conventions carefully, then follow them:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Exv14JzMpwMsf3nrnO0aKvq-RPTY4bPgVHoOc8E8fRI/edit?hl=en&authkey=CNXOzdgM

Process work: 7 of 10 points

--M. Hall

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