Sympathy
For me, the most emotional part of reading “How” was the fact that I found both characters to be extremely sympathetic. It is relatively easy to see why someone may find “you” or the main protagonist to be hard to relate to or sympathize with. Afterall, she seems to be treating this man rather poorly, especially given how obviously dedicated he is in the relationship. She is cold and emotionless, maybe even cynical at times, in the way that she not just behaves, but thinks about him. However, it is clear from the beginning of the story that she was eased into the situation she ended up in. She fell for him and when things began to go south she made “attempts at a less restrictive arrangement” (55) only to “watch them sputter and deflate like balloons” (55). And it’s not all bad. She still has moments when she knows she loves him, when she feels genuine emotion for him and sees him as a refuge in her life. As the story progresses the reader can see the bad starting to build and begin outweighing the good. Still, it is worth remembering that at one point she genuinely loved him, perhaps not as much as he loved her, but the feelings were reciprocated.
The protagonist is stuck in this awkward limbo where she really does care about this man, or at least has the decency to not want to hurt him. This is expressed through her continuously postponing when she thinks she will break up with him. She knows that she wants to leave the relationship yet she does not want to do it so she finds every excuse to stay in the relationship despite her discontent. This causes her to become increasingly frustrated with her situation. Then after the summer when she thinks she wants to break up with him his health problems arise. Again, she has the decency not to leave him in the middle of a health crisis and so she stays. In my opinion, this makes her a sympathetic character. If she was truly cold she would have broken up with him when she began really wanting to leave. While what she is doing may not be right, I can certainly understand why she does what she does. Even the manner in which she broke up with him, as messy and poorly executed as it was, was just her frustration accumulating over time, frustration that she did not feel as though she could let out. By the end of the story the reader realizes the relationship may not have been the entirety of the problem. Rather, this character seems to have gone numb to feeling anything. Perhaps it is a result from her long term relationship with a person she no longer really loved, or perhaps not, either way, by the end I want her to feel joy and liberation for finally getting out of the relationship that was confining her but instead she feels nothing.
On the flip side, from the protagonist’s perspective, the man is honestly really annoying. Everything he does seems to get on her nerves, from his somewhat clingy behavior to the way there always seems to be a rift in their understanding of one another. Still, it is obvious that he is deeply invested in this relationship. He clearly deeply cares for her and the situation he is unknowingly stuck in is really unfair to him. Nothing about the dysfunctionality in this relationship was really his fault. He did nothing to actually make their personalities collide besides be who he was. Additionally, he would have had no way of knowing what was coming for him. He commented at one point that she was cold, a somewhat valid complaint considering how much he was investing in their relationship, but did not seem to conclude on her indifference, or if he did he did not choose to acknowledge it. Because of this, her break up with him, must have been a shock to him. Even through the end, he handled the break up relatively well and in general rounded out the story as an objectively sympathetic boyfriend character.
I agree that both the characters in this story were pretty sympathetic. I felt like several of these early stories in the Lorrie Moore collection were more about how it is possible for someone to get trapped in a situation like this than actual advice on what one should do. From the beginning of the story, and especially when the boyfriend got sick, we could see the main character falling into this situation where she wants out but feels trapped. This is a situation where it is hard to fault either of them because neither one is doing anything overtly wrong, they are just growing apart. It is a lot easier to understand the motivations of the main character since we are so closely connected to her with the second person but I think that this is a story where we can feel sympathetic for each of them.
ReplyDeleteI do think that the female character is sympathetic and that the male character is annoying (in her perspective), but from the greater perspective I think that the guy character was really trying his best and he just didn't know how the woman character felt bc of mis/lack of communication, which really creates a bigger sense of sympathy for him.
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