Story Analysis: Poetic Justice

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Analysis: Poetic Justice
I have read the short story called Poetic Justice. The story is about a woman, who is around 40 years old. The woman is married and she has two kids. She is living a very stressful life – she goes to work at an office, takes care at her family and basically does anything practical. One day at her office she goes to an online communication website, very much like Facebook, called Friends United, to check up on her old friends, before she goes to pick up her daughter. When she logs in, she does not expect to find anyone online, especially not a man called Jed Cunningham. Jed Cunningham was her first boyfriend back in high school. He was a very intelligent young lad, and he was the first to really give her some challenge, instead of boring her. The last thing she had heard from him, was that he said, that she would never see nor hear from him again. She sits for a while, and then proceeds to write to Jed Cunningham, who in the end declares, that he still misses her a lot. But even though he says that, she just deletes his message, and goes back to her normal life. Jed Cunningham is, as I mentioned, a very intelligent man. He lives, just to experience, and he does not care about, what people expect of him. When Jed Cunningham and the main character in the story finished high school, Jed Cunningham had one of the best grade point averages on the entire school. He would have been able to get into the best colleges in the country, but after him and the main character broke up, he decided to move out of country. In the story it says, that he was one of the coolest kids at the school, and that he looked like an Irish poet. The text also says that unlike to the rest of the kids, Jed’s mind was already formed, and he was a real pain in the ass for the teachers sometimes. The woman sees herself as a much stressed mother. She thinks that she has a boring life, and that there is nothing “wild” or “intense” in her life anymore, compared to back when she was with Jed Cunningham. She misses being with Jed Cunningham in some ways, but in other ways, she like her life, the way it is. When she looks at herself in the mirror, she tells that she has got a pretty face, and that she is slim. The relationship between the woman and Jed Cunningham means a lot to the woman, even many years after, when she has gotten a family, and has a stable job. It is because of Jed Cunningham, that she misses excitement and being “wild”, like she was back when she was with Jed Cunningham. Jed might have been the first person that she fell in love with, which means he meant a lot to her, and she will probably never forget him. Because their relationship was so exciting for her, it might make her consider doing wild stuff later in her life – for example leaving her family to be with Jed Cunningham. The title, Poetic Justice could be interpreted in a lot of different ways; you could see it as if the woman did not end up with the wild, handsome and smart poet, because she hesitated, and before she knew anything, he was long gone. It could also be interpreted in other ways; it happens quite often that geniuses, artists and poets lives alone and die alone, sometimes because they feel way too intelligent to be with other people, and sometimes because they actually are too smart for other people. You could say, that living alone is the price of being a poet or an artists, so the fact that Jed Cunningham lives alone, could be poetic justice. There could be a lot of themes in this short story; one of them could be “Young love”, as it is about two people, who were in love back when they were young. It could also be something like; “The grass is always greener on the other side” – The woman considers leaving her life, so that she can be with Jed Cunningham, because she thinks, that all the excitement they had in their relationship when they were younger, might come back if she gets together with him again. In the ending she realizes, that even if the grass might be greener on the other side – that would maybe have had a great time with Jed – her life is already good, and that she has responsibilities that she cannot leave, so she decides to put her time with Jed Cunningham behind her, and accept and love her life as it is.