Preview

“Nostalgia was their crack cocaine…” How is nostalgia shown to be dangerous to the characters in the novel.

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
301 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
“Nostalgia was their crack cocaine…” How is nostalgia shown to be dangerous to the characters in the novel.
Erica is a character who demonstrates the extent of nostalgia’s damaging effects, her sanity of mind slowly depleting throughout the text. From the very beginning Changez notes that while she did has a certain “magnetism” about her one still ascertains the feeling that she “existed internally” and that some part of her “was out of reach, lost in thoughts unsaid”, this detachment provides a foreshadowment of the inner turmoil causing instability within Erica’s mind. As Changez and Erica become close he notices a picture drawn in her apartment which he discovers was drawn by Chris and he observes within the picture that there is a volcano containing “an island within an island – wonderfully sheltered and calm”, this symbolises Erica’s current state and when the 9/11 attacks occur it symbolises the volcano erupting resulting in the island within being thrust in to turbulent seas and violence, as Erica finds herself post the attacks, resulting in a deep state of nostalgia regarding Chris, who at one point was also her -ironically- protective volcano.
After the 9/11 attacks occur Erica became highly “introspective” and she states that she hasn’t been like this “since the first time, since Chris died”, her nostalgic thoughts becoming evident and with worrying consequences, Changez becomes desperate to “extricate her from the maze of her psychosis” to which she was slowly becoming more lost in as her thoughts turned to Chris. “When Chris died, Erica felt she had lost herself”, and the attacks on the World Trade Centre had plunged Erica back in to that state of introspection where “she did not know if she could be found”. Erica was slowly being overrun by “a powerful nostalgia” highlighting the dangers of becoming too nostalgic, with the danger of leaving a person “Emaciated, detached, and so lacking in life”.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    In the passage Changez is starting to wonder about the truth between Chris and Erica. He wants to know if they really had the true love that Erica always seems to mention when talking about her love with Chris. Changez feels that Erica is only remembering the good from her and Chris, and all those memories are starting to take over herself, especially when“She had only achieved orgasm, and that, too, by fantasizing about him”(90). Since he is Muslim and they are both Christian he doesn’t fully understand this relationship because he doesn't share the religious background that Erica and Chris once shared.…

    • 339 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Stephanie Coontz is a professor of Family History at the Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington. She is a nationally recognized expert on the family and an award winning writer. In her 1997 book “The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families”, Stephanie Coontz wrote an essay entitled “What We Really Miss about the 1950s”. In Stephanie Coontz’s “What We Really Miss about the 1950s”, she argues that we as a country collectively remember the 1950s with a nostalgic tone, but we are not remembering this era in its entirety, nor are we completely accurate. She explains that the family and economic life that we remember and long for does not represent the whole truth of that era by any means.…

    • 1136 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    On page 194, she dreams of some good memories but mostly bad memories from Iran and says she wishes her past would disappear. She is showing that she often dwelled on the past and bad memories are often most prominent to her. She is showing the readers that Iran haunted her even after she left. She views herself as oppressed and surrounded by haunting memories. Her bad memories became the depression that she would fall into.…

    • 322 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    After two of those things happened, she thought the wishes were coming true, but her dad never returned. In Helen on eighty-sixth Street, her losses are more important than her…

    • 297 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The father thinks back to Della’s funeral and seeing how sad Eric was crying against the doorway. Eric was seen as gentle and understanding to his father who was tumbling over his words. When the father brings up a childhood story about the mother, Eric is “wary” and “twitches” up, and tensions builds when Eric wants to know when it was said and the father “‘can’t remember’” (33, 37). The father desperately wants to remember Della by telling Eric a story of how she fell asleep as a child. When her name is mentioned, it is like ripping up a band-aid to Eric, and he gets annoyed with his father for bringing up a painful memory that he is trying to let go of. The fact that the father can’t be remember when Della told him the story adds to Eric’s annoyance when he lets out a yawn. In the next paragraph, the father expresses his fear of losing his memories of his wife which shows why he wants to continue to talk about her as Eric is trying to do the opposite and forget. When Eric remembered the story of the “spark,” it “surprised” his father because it was the first time that he had talked about something involving Della in “weeks” (43, 44). Eric brings up a story about when he was little and the family was watching a fireworks show; and a…

    • 1460 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Happiness, bliss, love, thrill, fear, heartbreak, but there's one word that stood strong beneath each of those, depression. It’s sad to think, that what everyone had failed to see was, that behind that smile of mine, was a darkness with so much depth it engulfed me. The only one who had ever known was the girl that was like a sister to me, Elena. We battled depression together for years, she was the one who won her battle…I did not. I couldn’t, it’d become the taunting, negative voice that kept me up every night and the one that’d scream at me everyday. The tears that’d stain my pillowcase and the reason I hid behind a mask since I’d been ten years old. Slowly everyday that truly happy girl everyone would know, became the happy girl everyone knew. Only if they had known, I couldn’t ever figure out why it’d cloud my thoughts, kill my happiness, and take complete control of my life. But no one would ever know, because I was able to go through those days with a smile so bright, no one would question if I was okay or not. The truth is I wasn’t, everything inside of me was tumbling down and…

    • 1644 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    In addition to Breakdancing, Disco became extremely popular. Disco became popular during the mid to late 70’s and largely consisted of youth going to dance clubs dressed in the new Disco style. This Disco styled clothing is composed of tube tops, sequined halterneck shirts, blazers, spandex short shorts, loose pants, form-fitting spandex pants, maxi skirts and dresses with long thigh slits, jersey wrap dresses, ball gowns, and evening gowns (Tom & Sarah Pendergast). Some viewed Disco as a “mere hedonistic escapism of little if any social value, an individualistic attempt to escape the real world – if only for a night” (Conway); however, others saw it as a subtle political statement accepting those of other ethnicities. Some claimed that the…

    • 869 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Case study depression

    • 1270 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Ellen is not comfortable and feels out of place and therefore is not interested in social activities, she feels guilty about not having a very loving relationship with her mother a guilt that extends to not doing more for her mother when she was sick. Ellen often thinks of suicide and has a plan to commit it. Her depression has lasted longer than a month and affects her health by not eating correctly.…

    • 1270 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    occurred in her life in Maycomb, Alabama. Throughout the book, Scout goes through a path…

    • 581 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Crank by Ellen Hopkins

    • 503 Words
    • 3 Pages

    “Life was good before I met the monster” said Kristina Snow. When her vacation is over she loses her old friends cannot keep up with her school work. Meanwhile to compensate with her loss of drugs she begins to date two boys both with different personalities. Bree only dated Brenden because he supplied her with meth. One night Brenden convinced Bree to do a line of cocaine and ends up raping her. Chase is accepting of Bree and loves her for who she is they soon fall in love, even though he feeds her habit. Kristina decides she doesn’t want to ruin Chase’s future of going to college, declining his hand in marriage. She than realizes that the monster is her and her addiction will never leave. “I hate this feeling. Like I'm here, but I'm not. Like someone cares. But they don't. Like I belong somewhere else, anywhere but here, and escape lies” said Kristina Snow.…

    • 503 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    English Essay

    • 1896 Words
    • 8 Pages

    deaths within her life. As she remembers these moments she is drawn back to her old life mentally and eventually physically as well.…

    • 1896 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Around the time the sun was about to appear one of Margot’s classmates William said, "Hey, everyone, let’s put her in a closet before the teacher comes!” and with that, “They surged about her, caught her up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a closet, where they slammed and locked the door.” They had just taken away the one thing she wanted most, to see the sun. However once the rain started up again and the sun slowly faded they remembered how Margot was still trapped in the closet. Now they could see that their jealousy had made them do things they were ashamed of.…

    • 470 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The people around her start to realize that signs of depression are present and she receives the recommendation to go see a therapist by the name of Doctor Gordon. Esther feels disconnected from Doctor Gordon and starts to hate him. Her animosity towards him starts to increase after he schedules her for electroshock therapy. Esther describes her therapy as “something [that] bent down and took hold of [her] and shook [her] like the end of the world” (Plath 117). She then continues by stating “with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant” (Plath 117-118). The descriptive imagery that she uses conveys her resentment towards the treatment. Esther then wonders “what terrible thing it was that [she] had done” (Plath 118). Esther loathed Dr. Gordon because of the pain that he put her through. This electroshock therapy eventually causes Esther’s condition to worsen; the exact opposite of the original intentions of the treatment. Between the indifferent Dr. Gordon, her nagging mother, and the pressure of society the constant thoughts of suicide start to plague Esther’s…

    • 826 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Halfbreed Analysis

    • 949 Words
    • 4 Pages

    When Campbell moves to Vancouver with her first husband, Darrel, in hopes for a better relationship and future. However, she turns into prostitution because her husband is no longer supporting her. The life of prostitution turns Campbell into drug addiction, which she thinks that it could help her to escape and forget about her problems. When she first started taking drugs, she mentioned, “I took them like they were going out of style. They helped me to sleep, they kept me happy, and most of all, I could forget about yesterday and tomorrow.” (Campbell, 136) But she then realized that drugs make her more and more depressed instead of making her happy, she was already addicted to it and could not escape from the addiction at that time and she aware that her dream is getting farther and farther away from her. “To live in that dream world meant I had to have enough money to pay for it. Heroin meant money and lots of it. That kind of money meant I had to keep the man who was keeping me happy.” (Campbell, 137) Because of her addiction, she had made bad decisions on her life such as prostitution and becoming a kept woman of a wealthy man. But at the same time, because of her addiction, the wealthy man left her and she went downhill with worse drug addiction, “By this time my sole obsession was dope. I didn’t care anymore about anything, not even my baby.” (Campbell, 138) The result of drug addiction makes her demand for a change; then she met Ray, a guy who helps her to get rid of drug addiction and provide her with a job that she can start a normal…

    • 949 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The argument that I am proposing is that Dr. Manhattan is in a constant state of nostalgia. As he experiences all of time at once, his past is becoming larger. As his past becomes larger, he values all those previous moments more so than his future. Dr. Manhattan values his past over his future so much so that he forces his responses in the present to be a product of his past and not his future. Perhaps a clearer way to say this is to suggest that Dr. Manhattan wants to be himself, and not care about knowing the future. It is also worth pointing out that this plays into one of the themes of the book, which is nostalgia. In making this argument, I am going to explain how Dr. Manhattan is constantly forced to relive his past and why that shapes…

    • 1967 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays