Читать реферат по английскому: "Life Experiences Are What Makes A Persons" Страница 2

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Dominick is in another relationship after his divorce of sixteen years with Dessa. He is living with a younger beautiful woman named Joy. After falling two stories while housepainting,Joy visits Dominick in the hospital with the wonderful news concerning her pregnancy. Dominick knows that Joy was unfaithful as the baby could not possibly be his as he underwent a vasectomy. Dominick tells Joy of his operation and she admits to cheating on him with another man. Dominick was cruelly lied to about an issue that was already delicate to him and as he lays in his hospital bed, he sinks into a depression and beings to question his reason for living. “Just let me lie here and think – play with the idea of dying.”(493) At the height of Dominicks depression, after learning that Joy allowed her other lover watch Dominick and her consummate, and after his mothers death, after learning his step father Ray had gangrene and had to have part of his leg removed, after realizing that he was still in love with Dessa and after recalling his childhood – which was supossed to be a time of happy memories, Dominick visualizes his suicide. “They’d send me home with painkillers, right? I could take them all at once with a bottle of? what did I have in the house anyway? scotch? Booze and pills, that would do it.” (524)

With Dominicks past and present combined, his life makes for an unhappy one. Since he was a child he had no sense of control. “When you’re the sane brother of a schitzophrenic identical twin, and you’re into survival of the fittest and being your brothers keeper? say goodbye to sleep and hello to the middle of the night.” (347) He has endured failed relationships, the death of his child, having to cope with the knowing that his brother crisis with schizophrenia was out of his control and for the first time he was unable to protect him; protecting Thomas was an idea which he had grown comfortable with as inconvenient as it was. Dominick also had no control over his mother’s death as she died from breast cancer and in extreme pain.

Through therapy, Dominick realizes that there is plenty for him to live for. He finds inner peace by learning more about himself and by sharing his thoughts and fears. Days before his mothers death, she had given Dominick her fathers autobiography. It was written in Italian (as he had emigrated from Sicily in 1901) and had to be translated. Dominick eventually learns how unfairly his mother was treated and gains a greater respect for her. Her father called the shots and she was used to being told what to do, which explains her obedience and need or submission for an aggressive partner. All her life she was told she was inferior and she had believed it. It does not seem fair to Dominick that she had to endure a life of pain and then die in pain. He does not understand why bad things happen to good people.

After years of living in the maximum security institution, Thomas is placed back in the minimum security institution temporarily and then re-released. The world he is set into is not a familiar one and he decides to end his life on the edge of the woods where Ray, he and Dominick spent a fishing weekend in 1962 as children. Ironically, Thomas killed himself in the same place where he recalls finding a dead squirrel which appeared to have somewhat of an impact on his life.

“One thing I remember about that trip was this dead squirrel that someone had trapped inside a firebox. They’d put a bunch of rocks on top to keep him trapped in there. He was all huddled up in a corner, but you could tell he’d gone mental trying to get out. There was crusty black blood around his mouth and he stank and bugs had eaten out his eyes. Ray lifted him out with a stick and flung him. He didn’t land all the way in the woods: he landed right on the edge. I wanted to bury him and have a funeral, but Ray told me to stop the sissy stuff. All the time we were there,

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