More, More and More Fire

I appealed to emotion.

 

 

I wouldn’t expect that after getting out of a whole memoir about a boy who burned himself that I would have to deal with another suicide attempt where another person, Polly, tried to kill herself by lighting herself on fire.  

In the memoir Girl, Interrupted we once more realize what people think about life and how little they value it. “Life was hellish, she knew that” (18). People make decisions, wrong decisions constantly and they don’t learn from them.

Polly, a friend of Susanna’s from the hospital tried to kill herself. Nobody knew why, but Susanna helps us understand that putting yourself on fire takes “courage” (17).

By using Pathos Susanna appeals to our emotions by explaining that “We’ve all had those”(17) meaning suicide attempts;  like taking twenty aspirin, or slitting your veins, or maybe even putting a gun in your mouth. You are often defeated by the moment when you get the gun and put it in your mouth, since most of the times you have to “put it back in the drawer” (17). She herself has put the gun “back in the drawer” many times.  She has tried to commit suicide but she hasn’t been successful. She hasn’t learned from these past decisions’ and she continues to make the same mistake of trying to commit suicide.

We feel somewhat powerless, we can’t help her, and she had no help in her process of making decisions when she wanted to commit suicide.  She relates to Polly, but at the same time she admires her for her strength in being able to get over and defeat the moment.

This is why she doesn’t understand how she wasn’t defeated by the single second moment when “she lit the match” (17) and then lit her body. “A whole world lies between this moment” (16) this moment that you have closely planned, and thought over and over endless sleepless nights.

Once again, we go back to the whole locked up situation that all the patients in this hospital are leading with. There is the emotional lock down, where you know you are never getting out, or that you don’t know when that moment is going to be, and this is what happens with Susanna she feels as if she has no escape. And then there is another type of lock down, the one that you are never getting out of, where there is no hope. This is Polly’s. She is “forever locked up in that body” (19).  A body all burned full of scars. Susanna gives us hope, in saying that she might get out of there “sometime” (19).

Every day we deal with people that dont value life, we forget that there is always hope. For everything.