[показать]Choose a short story from the reading we’ve done this semester in which the protagonist has to make a decision or take some decisive step that will alter the rest of his or her life. Explain the nature of the character’s decision, the reasons for it, and its probable consequences (as suggested by what readers can infer from the information given by the author).

Among the stories we have read during this semester, “The Yellow Wallpaper” seems to be one of the most symbolic. This story describes a few months from the life of a woman who is suffering from a postpartum depression and who, being a narrator, lets the reader experience the whole rollercoaster of this condition together with her. One can notice the narrator’s disturbed mental state, which becomes apparent from her paranoia about the house in general and the room she and her husband are staying in particular, from the very first lines of the story. For the woman, this house and room are symbolic of a trap of her mental condition, from which she cannot escape.

Throughout the story, the reader can see gradual mental deterioration of the narrator. In the beginning of the story, for example, she sincerely hopes and strives to get better. She realizes that there is a beautiful world outside, and that she just needs to find her way back into it. The fact that she keeps contrasting the strange and lonely “haunted house” that is as isolated as she is with the charming surroundings of a “delicious garden…large and shady, full of box bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seas under them” emphasizes this inner struggle. Through little details, like shut windows of the protagonist’s room and her desire to move to another bedroom that opens onto the piazza, the author further showcases the discord within the protagonist and her attempts to escape from the trap of her own mind.

Unfortunately, because of the lack of understanding from her husband, instead of getting better, the narrator falls into even deeper depression, which is indicated by her new developed fixation on the yellow wallpaper. Since she is not able to find understanding in people, this woman begins to look for it in an inanimate object. Perhaps, initially, it is the color of the wallpaper, which is sickly and repelling, that attracts the protagonist’s attention because it reminds her of her own illness. Since the narrator does not have anything to distract her mind from strange feeling of having some sort of connection with the wallpaper, she continues to emerge into an imaginary world where every recurring spot and curl of the wallpaper has a meaning.

The longer she stares at the wallpaper, the more it reminds the protagonist of a book, in which she reads about all of her most coveted thoughts. In the convoluted pattern, the narrator sees broken necks and white bulbous eyes that most likely reflect her own thoughts about suicide, a woman who is trapped behind the bars, and the everlasting curls that remind of her own pain that seems to go nowhere no matter how much time passes. The more time the narrator spends alone in the room, the deeper these strange and disturbing thoughts consume her, until she begins to derive pleasure from this condition: “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.”

The reader can notice that quite often the narrator discusses the wallpaper, its pattern, and women crawling inside it without realizing that she is talking about herself. Thus, when she mentions that nobody but her understands the wallpaper, she speaks about her condition not being understood by people who are the dearest to her. In the same manner, when the narrator says that sometimes she “thinks there are many women behind, and sometimes only one,” she is wondering about whether there are any women out there who suffer from the same condition as she. As the time goes by, the protagonist emerges in her delusions to the extent of thinking that it is her who has been crawling behind the yellow wallpaper all this time, and her sickness takes over completely.