Fear and Foresight

Fear and foresight have a major impact in many of our life altering choices when provided with time to think the decision through. Before making life-altering decisions there is the foresight component, in which we make predictions about what the result of our decision will be, and the fear part of it, in which we make predictions about all of the negative results that could come from making a major decision. It is essentially weighing the risks involved as well as the potential rewards that could just as easily come from it. In the excerpt from “Tin Flute,” Florentine, the main character is presented with an opportunity to move on from the position that she is in, one that she is unhappy with, but the opportunity seems so unknown and foreign to her that the decision is very difficult for her to make. The excerpt shows how much fear and foresight interplay and counteract each other eventually pushing us to make our decision.

Florentine finds herself in a less than desirable situation, working full time at a restaurant, for a low wage and she feels as though she is wasting her life. When she talks about how her lips have wrinkles that she can see developing, what she means is that she is beginning to notice that her youth is slipping away from her. When she is working at her job she feels as though she has already lived her life, had her fun and her best times are behind her. A quote that really demonstrates this is when the author writes, “All youth, confidence, vivacity seemed to have fled from her listless, shrunken eyes leaving a vacuum.” She is saying that even though she is still young, being stuck in a dead end job and barely getting by is sucking the life out of her. Her foresight has shown her that she has to make a change in her life soon before she ends up trapped there. She knows she has to commit fully to trying to escape her current situation.

The man who wants to take her to the movies represents a way for her to escape the situation that she has grown to hate so much. “He might be nothing but a machinist at the moment, but she was confident that he would be prosperous in the future, a future with which a strong instinct urged her to ally herself.” This fortifies the message that she views him as a way out. She is also very unsure of him at the beginning of the story. She says that guys like him make sport of her so she is unsure of weather she should place her faith blindly into this man. She is unsure of what his intentions are so she is very apprehensive of him. She knows almost nothing about him and when she fishes for information, he offers very little. This emphasizes that even though she is unhappy she is comfortable in her current situation and in order for her to escape, she has to place her faith in the unknown and that is very frightening for her.

The excerpt from “Tin Flute” suggests that when we are making life altering decisions, it is a often a choice between futures that we can foresee and may not like, or overcoming fear branching out and going for something new and unknown. The excerpt is about how fear can push us to either shy away from taking a chance in our major life decisions or make us realize that if we don’t things will never change. The excerpt ends without answering the question of what her final decision was; which is effective in showing that this excerpt was not about the end result, it was more of a description of a situation that many people end up during their lifetime.