Girl Interrupted Character Analysis

Susanna Kaysen, in her memoir Girl, Interrupted, recounts her eighteen-month stay at a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts. The events in the book took place in the 1960’s, meaning outside the hospital’s reinforced walls, the world was bustling with racism, social activism, and the Vietnam War. The story is not told as a chronological series of events, but rather as a collection of memories, darting between various periods of Kaysen’s visit. Throughout her stay at the hospital, Kaysen met a variety of women who influenced her life profoundly, including a self-proclaimed sociopath, a girl with a face disfigured by burns, and a meth addict. In Girl, Interrupted, author Susannah Kaysen achieves her purpose of elaborating on the dangers of confusing unconventionality with insanity, through characterization, impressionism, symbolism, and her
In the years following her stay at the ward, Kaysen began to realize that almost two years of her life had been taken from her. While visiting the Frick Museum in New York, Kaysen sees a painting that she views as a metaphor for the time she lost at the hospital. In Kaysen’s own words, “… I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?” (Kaysen 167). Kaysen sees the painting as a symbol for her own life, indicating that her institutionalization caused more harm than good. She was technically a child when she arrived at the hospital, and an adult when she left, yet she had missed a key portion of the transition. The symbolism of the painting allows the reader to comprehend the significance of Kaysen’s