Break It Down By Lydia Davis Summary
“Break it Down”
In the short story “Break it Down”, by Lydia Davis the narrator is obsessively trying to calculate eight days of love, in which he spent approximately $800. In the process of evaluating the cost, he breaks down the love affair, but soon it is clear that he is trying to specify a love affair, to make sense of something that is gone. The narrator takes on the subject of failed love and lovers’ pain, showing the ways in which the mourning-self wrestles with the instincts to express memories into language as a way to deal with feelings of pain and isolation.
Eventually, he figures out that they had sex once a day, eight times total, so he spent $100 each time, or $50 an hour since they stayed in bed for two hours, an experience that he decides is expensive. But he goes further, the cost must include the small moments as well. “You 're with each other all day long and it keeps happening, the touches and smiles, and it all adds up....” (Davis 399). Soon he breaks down the cost to $6 an hour as …show more content…
he tallies up all of those times when the lover is present or absent, because “you can 't forget and it 's all inside you all the time" (402). It 's a laughable exercise to try to evaluate such an experience, of course, but the narrator 's project also begs many questions as he recounts the number of tenderness’s, the beautiful and precious moments that add nothing to economic outcomes or better the world in any positive way. His tallies hit a wall when he reckons with the inevitable pain of the affair. Pain has to be part of the equation, but the recognition of it as natural in the pleasures of relations, whether it 's a pet, a child, or a lover. Devastate the entire notion of trying to make this existential equation make sense. “You can 't measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer. So the question is, why doesn 't that pain make you say, I won 't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don 't” (403).
You have the capacity for great intimacy.
But you often fear that your partner does not wish to be as close as you would like. Relationships tend to consume a lot of your emotional energy. You are sensitive to small things in your partner’s mood and you take your partner’s behavior overly personally. You worry if you don’t hear from your partner regularly. When you feel like your partner is getting distant, you tend to express your anxiety by threatening to leave someone and hoping to make them stay.Assuming that we have no reason to hide or disguise our feelings, if we like certain people, we are more likely to spend time with them, talk with them, confide in them, do nice things for them, and in general we strive to make them happy. On the other hand, if we dislike or are angry with certain other people, we are likely to avoid spending time with them, avoid talking with them, avoid doing nice things for them, and in general we do not strive to make them
happy.
He explains, “Say $80 a day, no, more like $100 a day. And we made love, say, once a day on the average. That’s $100 a shot” (399). As a result, the story becomes a record of the narrator’s journal-like attempt to see how his recollected experience of being with his lover maps onto a superficial-accepted, superior mode of measuring the value of experience. The haunting emotional behavior of the narrator’s process of “breaking it down” enters the story only indirectly. It is when the narrator attempts to account for the “cost” of pain that his method collapses. Certainly “Break It Down” is about the narrator’s efforts to make sense of his memories by putting them into language. Specifically, the narrator’s tendency toward expressing himself within terms of two desires, listing and analyzing. These impulses can ultimately be identified as a symptom of the narrator’s efforts to detach emotionally from his memories. His process is one of translating the activity of his mind into language as a means of self-defense against feeling pain and isolation at the end of an affair.
The narrator frequently writes of equations that do not work out, equations that cannot be balanced because their terms are divergent. As the hero of “Break It Down” tries to figure out whether, in the end, he paid $100 an hour for his love affair or $3, he dwells more and more on his sensual memories, of architecture and the weather and his lover’s sleepy-eyed midnight face. So although a relationship can be broken down into a flight, a hotel, a ticket, a touch on the shoulder, “her blue eyes,” and “this sharp heavy pain,” six hundred or a thousand dollars can never come out to equal an old shirt because heartbreak is material for a different kind of reckoning than mathematical. Heartbreak is exclusive, the raw force is resistant to analysis. The story reaches this tragic realization, but then, to support the cliché that life is nothing but a cruel joke, Davis ends with this climax. "So I 'm just thinking about it, how you can go in with $600, more like $1,000, and how you can come out with an old shirt" (403).
Works Cited
Davis, Lydia. "Break It Down" New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986. Print.
"Book Review: Break It Down, by Lydia Davis." Suite. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Sept. 2014.
In the short story “Break it Down”, by Lydia Davis the narrator is obsessively trying to calculate eight days of love, in which he spent approximately $800. In the process of evaluating the cost, he breaks down the love affair, but soon it is clear that he is trying to specify a love affair, to make sense of something that is gone. The narrator takes on the subject of failed love and lovers’ pain, showing the ways in which the mourning-self wrestles with the instincts to express memories into language as a way to deal with feelings of pain and isolation.
Eventually, he figures out that they had sex once a day, eight times total, so he spent $100 each time, or $50 an hour since they stayed in bed for two hours, an experience that he decides is expensive. But he goes further, the cost must include the small moments as well. “You 're with each other all day long and it keeps happening, the touches and smiles, and it all adds up....” (Davis 399). Soon he breaks down the cost to $6 an hour as …show more content…
he tallies up all of those times when the lover is present or absent, because “you can 't forget and it 's all inside you all the time" (402). It 's a laughable exercise to try to evaluate such an experience, of course, but the narrator 's project also begs many questions as he recounts the number of tenderness’s, the beautiful and precious moments that add nothing to economic outcomes or better the world in any positive way. His tallies hit a wall when he reckons with the inevitable pain of the affair. Pain has to be part of the equation, but the recognition of it as natural in the pleasures of relations, whether it 's a pet, a child, or a lover. Devastate the entire notion of trying to make this existential equation make sense. “You can 't measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer. So the question is, why doesn 't that pain make you say, I won 't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don 't” (403).
You have the capacity for great intimacy.
But you often fear that your partner does not wish to be as close as you would like. Relationships tend to consume a lot of your emotional energy. You are sensitive to small things in your partner’s mood and you take your partner’s behavior overly personally. You worry if you don’t hear from your partner regularly. When you feel like your partner is getting distant, you tend to express your anxiety by threatening to leave someone and hoping to make them stay.Assuming that we have no reason to hide or disguise our feelings, if we like certain people, we are more likely to spend time with them, talk with them, confide in them, do nice things for them, and in general we strive to make them happy. On the other hand, if we dislike or are angry with certain other people, we are likely to avoid spending time with them, avoid talking with them, avoid doing nice things for them, and in general we do not strive to make them
happy.
He explains, “Say $80 a day, no, more like $100 a day. And we made love, say, once a day on the average. That’s $100 a shot” (399). As a result, the story becomes a record of the narrator’s journal-like attempt to see how his recollected experience of being with his lover maps onto a superficial-accepted, superior mode of measuring the value of experience. The haunting emotional behavior of the narrator’s process of “breaking it down” enters the story only indirectly. It is when the narrator attempts to account for the “cost” of pain that his method collapses. Certainly “Break It Down” is about the narrator’s efforts to make sense of his memories by putting them into language. Specifically, the narrator’s tendency toward expressing himself within terms of two desires, listing and analyzing. These impulses can ultimately be identified as a symptom of the narrator’s efforts to detach emotionally from his memories. His process is one of translating the activity of his mind into language as a means of self-defense against feeling pain and isolation at the end of an affair.
The narrator frequently writes of equations that do not work out, equations that cannot be balanced because their terms are divergent. As the hero of “Break It Down” tries to figure out whether, in the end, he paid $100 an hour for his love affair or $3, he dwells more and more on his sensual memories, of architecture and the weather and his lover’s sleepy-eyed midnight face. So although a relationship can be broken down into a flight, a hotel, a ticket, a touch on the shoulder, “her blue eyes,” and “this sharp heavy pain,” six hundred or a thousand dollars can never come out to equal an old shirt because heartbreak is material for a different kind of reckoning than mathematical. Heartbreak is exclusive, the raw force is resistant to analysis. The story reaches this tragic realization, but then, to support the cliché that life is nothing but a cruel joke, Davis ends with this climax. "So I 'm just thinking about it, how you can go in with $600, more like $1,000, and how you can come out with an old shirt" (403).
Works Cited
Davis, Lydia. "Break It Down" New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986. Print.
"Book Review: Break It Down, by Lydia Davis." Suite. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Sept. 2014.