Character Analysis

What doesn’t have name

by: Piedad Bonnett

Bad decisions? or just circumstances?

Piedad Bonnett in this short but concrete story “What doesn’t have name” is going
to make us see the reality of many teenagers and mental illness problems in the
modern world.
In this book we are transported to the cruel but true story of Daniel, a young man
who suffers from schizophrenia and has to deal with all the pressures of a harsh
world. Daniel is an art student at the most prestigious university of Colombia and
day by day he has to face the consequences of his difficult illness. In the process
he enters to a bunch of crisis with his profession as an artist and all the problems
of his day to day life. Daniel decide to finish his studies with a PHd in the university
of Columbia, New York. One of the most important facts of the character is the
bad experiences he has to live with the doctors, psychologists, and multiple
treatment for his mental state.

Daniel is a vulnerable young boy, he tries hard to be happy but his situation
doesn’t really let him have a normal life. We as readers can notice this from the
beginning ᴏf the book, (29) “We talk about Daniel, we review his life, we recall
little anecdotes, some of which amuse us while others cause us serene pain. We
laughed at that first day of class when, clueless as I am, I send him in shorts
because I was not sure that the uniform was changing, making him embarrassed in
front of his classmates. And the day he fell on his grandmother's manger,
destroying houses, sheeps, and shepherds. But we also look back with regret at
his moments of confusion and hopelessness. "
The reader is told directly the multiple truths of Daniel’s harsh life. Notice that all
his family make constant efforts to make him feel “normal” but it’s not that easy.
(47) “He had many seasons of happiness, of fulfillment, his doctor said. And also
his healthy part was huge. Most of the time he was able to live as a normal
person.”
Here we can see that even his doctor at that time noticed there was a part of him
that was really healthy and probably happy as well.
There are a lot of factors that took place in the suicide of Daniel. In every process
of recovery from a mental illness doctors are a really important part of it. As
parents didn’t have the tools to manage such things, doctors made a huge part of
Daniel’s life. (49)“Daniel accepted and started going to therapy. But two or three
months later, terrified, he entered our room, sat on the edge of the bed, and told
us that the psychologist had told him that "you have to kill the father," and other
things like that. 'It's driving me crazy, 'I don't want to go back'. " In Daniel process
the few compassion from the doctors at the end of his life was huge, and actually
the autor makes a lot of emphasis on social and medical intervention with mental
illnesses. We as readers must be led to deep reflection, and hopefully it is not
something we miss. It would be of great help to the world. (100)“Trying to know
what was going on in Daniel's head in his last days, we go to New York where the
doctor who treated him in the last month. She is a young woman, with soft
gestures, who receives us with obvious nervousness. She is afraid, perhaps, of
facing angry parents, a lawsuit in the worst case. This could be the case, since we
found out there that she advised him to decrease the dose of his antipsychotic,
although she never asked for his patient's medical history or knew what his
diagnosis was. The only strange thing for her was that our son took such a
delicate medicine, when he was "a fairly normal boy, with mild signs of paranoia,
yes, but no other really serious symptoms."
(64)“The doctor G yawns. It's two thirty in the afternoon. And the only thing that
he answers to my questions is 'What do you want me to tell you?'"

There is no doubt that his personality also had a great impact, he was a
perfectionist. (100)"A boy concerned about his professional future, about the
young women around him and about love, with concerns totally typical of his age."
Sadly we live in a world where we lack of empathy and specially with mental
illnesses we are hardly able to put ourselves on the other are still quite a taboo
topic, you don't need the one that only calls you crazy.
We can see this in Daniel’s life as well, (48) “I am not going to pronounce the
name, says the sick man, because they are going to flee from me, because they
will abandon me, because they will confine me, because they will not love me or
marry me. Because they will look at me with fear. I'm not going to pronounce that
name, says the father, says the mother, because this can't be real."
(106) “How difficult to escape orthodoxy, the paths traced by a society that
determines what are the ways of success. We almost always travel through narrow
roads, looking for a supposed coherence, frightened by chaos ᴏ dilettantism."
Life pressures and crisis break into his life without compassion, which has quite
large effects in his life. He cared a lot about his professional success, he didn't
want to be a failure. This led him to put too much pressure, more than he and his
world could bear. (66) “Daniel confessed to me that the crisis in relation to his
vocation as a painter and draftsman had reached its highest point of overwhelm.
‘He had no talent. He was never going to be able to make a living from painting.
But also, nobody values it anymore, it is an expression of the past.’ He said"
(68)"Daniel said: 'It's been very hard, I haven't connected the neuron for three
years.'" (52) "I know he was afraid of his future, of the extent of his illness, of the
scarcity."

Overall Daniel was a really intelligent boy, with a lot of potential and great human
being. This is evident during the entire book, his mom, the author make us see this
pretty clear. (64) "I tell him what Daniel is like, I tell him that he has talent, that he
is intellectually brilliant"
For me it is really sad that the circumstances and maybe bad management of a
terrible illness lead him to a suicide. I would like to finish with this quotation,
(100-101) “The
so-called« perfect storm »that enhances a suicide requires three factors: a
physical one (in this case the illness), a subjective one (perhaps the intimate
feeling of failure?) And a social one (perhaps what A. Álvarez describes as "The
insufferable threat of public scrutiny").