Preview

The Disappearance Analysis

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1847 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Disappearance Analysis
The short story “The Disappearance” by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni basically is about an Indian man who lived in America. At first, he married an educated Indian girl. However, she, unlike her husband, did not have a traditional mindset. She eventually left him, and this was something which he could not accept. He started to recall the times when she was with him. He was in a state of denial that his wife could possibly leave him when he thought he had been good to him, and that he had done enough to satisfy her. However, this was not the case. His wife wanted a modern husband – one who would let her have her say, and not only bringing her to Yosemite Park. He tried to forget about her, but he could not do so. He then came across a light old tea tin which she used to put her jewelry in. In his deep conscious mind, he knew that something was wrong in their marriage, although it seemed perfectly fine on the surface. He went to bank to find all her jewelry gone, but she did not take anything which was not hers. Reality slapped him in the face – he realized that she had really left him. Sad and humiliated, he remarried a simple and uneducated woman who would never be anything like his first wife – a modern woman with a need for say and equality.
Before moving on to the analysis of the short story, one needs at least some background knowledge about the author to fully understand what compelled him or her to write a story. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was born in Kolkata, India. She went to the United States for her graduate studies, receiving a Master’s degree in English from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. She also has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Most of her works are set in India and the United States, and the focus of her stories are often on the experiences of South Asian immigrants. She held many odd jobs to continue studying, including babysitting and working in the dining hall of the International House where she lived before. She

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Saving Sourdi Summary

    • 581 Words
    • 3 Pages

    If the story had been written from the mother’s point of view, we would know her reasons for wanting Sourdi to marry Mr. Chhay. We would also know more about her relationship with her daughters.…

    • 581 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the beginning of the story it talked about Kracha’s journey to America. He was on his way to America and he met this woman named Zuska. It was her birthday and she had just turned nineteen. Kracha ended up spending all his money on her, buying her drinks, hoping that he would…

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Divakurani's short story, "Clothes," recounts the story of an Indian woman, Sumita, as she begins an arranged marriage that takes her to America and introduces her to an entirely new life. I found it fascinating to read, in part because its account of Indian society's view of a woman's role is as different from my own experience as it is from the role women play in American society.…

    • 264 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In “Mrs. Perez” a short story written by Oscar Casares, a woman comes home to find out that she is missing a prized possession. Throughout the story we read about how she interacts and handles this incident in various ways. There are flashbacks throughout the story to further and deepen the plot.…

    • 379 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Aparna is a traditional Bengali housewife that had been transplanted to the United States. When the story begins, the reader can’t help but to feel sorry for the loneliness that Aparna must be feeling. She is in a country which thrives on a culture that is very different from the one which she is familiar with. Her husband is engulfed by his work and Aparna is left to entertain herself daily. She has few friends in the United States and nothing to occupy her time. Lahiri writes “…I would return from school and find my mother with her purse in her lap and her trench coat on, desperate to escape the apartment where she had spent the day alone.” As the plot continues, the reader is given hope…

    • 893 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    is a story of a young couple who are of Native American descent (one Spokane and the other Apache) who while walking outdoors near their college campus overhear a cat trapped in the thorns of a blackberry bush and rescue it. Upon returning the cat to the rightful owners that narrator tells them that it was his idea to call them and that he was the one that rescued their cat. In reality it was his fiancé, Sharon who had done all of that. After leaving the cat with the owners Sharon becomes upset with the narrator and doesn’t speak to him for an extended period of time. This causes the narrator to worry that maybe she is having second thoughts about marrying him. Sometime later on she returns to him and saying to that she is going to marry a liar. After several years together as a married couple she tells the story of the trapped cat to many family members, her children, and her grandchildren about how he lied about the saving the cat. Years went by and the story had more and more added to it to make it humorous; such as the narrator falling into the river. Towards the end of the story Sharon is laying on her deathbed and we see this conversation between the…

    • 836 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Zitkala Sa’s “The School Days of an Indian Girl”, Zitkala herself was ill-informed to the intentions of the white people. She ignored her mother’s wishes for her not to go to the assimilation school, and because of that, when she returned home her mother could see her “suffering” with being back in her Indian culture (Sa 1099). Zitkala’s newfound unfamiliarity with both her Native American and white culture caused her to be unhappy in either culture. Another case of ignorance leading to discontent was in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “A New England Nun”. Joe Dagget spent “fourteen out of…fifteen years” of their engagement “in Australia, where he had gone to make his fortune” (Freeman 656). Dagget was selfish in his thinking that Louisa would be patiently waiting for him at home, still as in love with him as she was before. In fact, Louisa felt “consternation” when she first saw the man she was to marry (Freeman 657). The misinformation given in this case, led to the misery of two people, no longer in love, but who both felt they owed it to the other to continue on with the marriage. In all these cases, ignorance of the truth was the root of each character’s displeasure in their…

    • 1468 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mukherjee’s diction is one that asks for attention as well. To convey her story, she uses very simple word choice; nothing fancy is found anywhere throughout the essay. Questionable words such as “Indianness” are used in her writing. This, perhaps, is a result of guilt, or sense of realization that she was an Indian before she was American. Perhaps she realized that she came to the country without knowing a word of English and is now a successful writer, at the cost of her native heritage. She mentions she has a white husband, which broke her family tradition which lasted for at least 3000 years. This was the conflict that the story brought up, which may have affected her writing at the time. The sense of emotion within her was what compelled her to write simply yet effectively. After all, she is…

    • 359 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Marriage and Divorce America Style by E. MAVIS HETHERINGTON speaks about how divorce remarriage affects our community, children, women and men today, The percentage of women and men who were forced to into getting married without any commitment and it also talks about good marriages, bad marriages, good divorce, and bad divorce. Marriage is classified into serval aspect and it’s diverse.…

    • 325 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Comparison Essay

    • 1127 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The Painted Door by Sinclair Ross is about a couple that has been married for 7 years, in which, they’ve lived on an isolated farm. The wife Anne seeks change in her boring life resulting in her committing adultery. Later in the story Anne comes to the realization that she’s truly in love with John but it didn’t matter because John had witnessed her sin. John is announced dead because while walking away from his home in dismay he froze to death. In comparison, Behind the Headlines by Vidyut Akulujkar the wife Lakshmi is tired of her repetitive life style which is cause by her husband Hariharan who was a “[]promised professor of economics in a respectable Canadian university.”(pg139) The couple were immigrants from India therefore they carried on a traditional marriage. Shortly after Hariharan leaves to a work conference his wife Lakshmi dropped her house keys into the mail slot showing that she was not coming back to him. These two short stories are similar in the aspects of conflict, plot, and characterization.…

    • 1127 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Live Free and Starve

    • 774 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was born in 1956 in Calcutta, India. After spending almost the first two decades of her life in her home town she immigrated to the United States. There she earned her PhD from Berkeley and became a published author. One of the stories Divakaruni wrote was Live Free and Starve. This story deals with the issue of child labor in third world countries. The U.S. House passed a bill that no longer allowed the import of goods to America from factories that forced child labor was used. Many Americans were pleased by the bill because they thought it was bettering humanity. However, Divakaruni had different feelings towards it. Divakaruni uses the method of cause and effect to help portray her thoughts to the audience.…

    • 774 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Clothes

    • 590 Words
    • 3 Pages

    There are many persons introduced in the text. The main character is Mita Moni. Later she is called Somita Sen because she gets married. She is an Indian girl, and she is going to get married to the Indian man Somesh Sen, who lives in the USA with his family. It is an arranged marriage but even though Somita is nervous about what it will bring, she is happy for her husband. She also thinks that the marriage and her moving in with her in-laws in the USA would make her life better. Her dreams break when it turns up that the Sen Family also live by the Indian traditions. She thinks Somesh is a beautiful man and she is proud being his wife. He is very kind to her, and buys her clothes and makes her the promise that they will move out his parent’s house as soon as possible. When he dies Somita goes through the Indian rituals that a widow has to do, but her in-laws wants her to be free and gives her the chance to start a life in the USA even though they move back to India.…

    • 590 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The film Hidden in Silence is based on a true story. During WWII, while Jews are sent to ghettos, Catholic teenager Stefania Podgorska (called Fusia in the movie) helps 13 Jews to save their life while raising her little sister. Every day, she risks execution by given food and water to the silent individuals living above her. The film is not very explicit in the violence against the Jews; instead, it conveys a message of hope for mankind, despite the horror humanity shows itself in sensitive ways throughout the film.…

    • 437 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Cited: Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007.…

    • 2424 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The story begins with separation and isolation as the American wife stares out the window while her husbands rests on the bed reading. Readers can infer that the relationship has lasted isolated this way for a while as even through conversation the husband, George, relays distant and uninterested. The marriage leaves the American girl so lonely that simple conversation makes her happy with the italian desk manager, “The wife liked him. She liked the deadly serious way he received any complaints. She liked his dignity. She liked the way he wanted to serve her” (Cat 1). Despite convestating being apart of the man’s job, the girl appreciates the moments of attention that she soughts after a cat in the rain. In the final scene the need of company is reassured as she discusses change, “I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel”(Cat 2). She requests her husband’s opinion about growing out her hair just to make conversation and he shuts her down with a simple reply of saying he likes it the way it is. In the end the theme of isolation is never resolved as the protagonist must continue her life as the “American…

    • 969 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays