Living with Strangers
Living with Strangers
Every community has unwritten rules that only fellow citizens understand. These rules have inspired the American novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt to write the essay “Living with Strangers” in The New York Times in 2002. The essay is about the cultural differences she had to deal with when she moved from Minnesota - where people are accused of being a snob if they don’t greet everyone they meet - to New York - where people live rather isolated lives and greeting strangers on the street makes people think you are mentally unstable.
The first person narrator in the essay is the author, Hustvedt, because it is a personal essay - an essay which is characterized by a lot of reflections and observations from everyday life. In this essay Hustvedt discusses communication and human interaction today. She is daunted by the mentality of New Yorkers, and she makes up the “Pretend-it-isn’t-happening”-law to define the cultural tendencies. The law describes how people in New York ignore sudden incidents instead of acting upon them. The essay begins with a flashback to the narrator’s hometown and to 1978 where she moved to New York. At that time it transcended her barriers to be able to watch and listen to her neighbors in private moments because she overheard an intense row between her downstairs neighbors and watched some other neighbors walk around in their underwear. Hustvedt describes the intimidation when she talks about her first time in the subway: “… I could smell their hair oils, perfumes, and sweat. In my former life, such closeness belonged exclusively to boyfriends and family.”1 Moreover, this is referred to in the title of the essay, because she feels like she is living with strangers. The narrator develops throughout the story, though. In the middle part of the essay she has a husband and a 15-year-old daughter - she is living in New York, but she is still rather skeptical towards the New York culture. In the end she acknowledges
Every community has unwritten rules that only fellow citizens understand. These rules have inspired the American novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt to write the essay “Living with Strangers” in The New York Times in 2002. The essay is about the cultural differences she had to deal with when she moved from Minnesota - where people are accused of being a snob if they don’t greet everyone they meet - to New York - where people live rather isolated lives and greeting strangers on the street makes people think you are mentally unstable.
The first person narrator in the essay is the author, Hustvedt, because it is a personal essay - an essay which is characterized by a lot of reflections and observations from everyday life. In this essay Hustvedt discusses communication and human interaction today. She is daunted by the mentality of New Yorkers, and she makes up the “Pretend-it-isn’t-happening”-law to define the cultural tendencies. The law describes how people in New York ignore sudden incidents instead of acting upon them. The essay begins with a flashback to the narrator’s hometown and to 1978 where she moved to New York. At that time it transcended her barriers to be able to watch and listen to her neighbors in private moments because she overheard an intense row between her downstairs neighbors and watched some other neighbors walk around in their underwear. Hustvedt describes the intimidation when she talks about her first time in the subway: “… I could smell their hair oils, perfumes, and sweat. In my former life, such closeness belonged exclusively to boyfriends and family.”1 Moreover, this is referred to in the title of the essay, because she feels like she is living with strangers. The narrator develops throughout the story, though. In the middle part of the essay she has a husband and a 15-year-old daughter - she is living in New York, but she is still rather skeptical towards the New York culture. In the end she acknowledges