The Sin Eater

The author Margaret Atwood is a feminist. In a lot of her stories the narrator is found to be a very intelligent woman, but has trouble conversing mentally, usually, with men. The story "The Sin Eater" is in fact about an intelligent, but egotistical, woman who struggles over the death of her psychiatrist, Joseph, and the sins that we are left in the occurrence of death. The narrator, feels as though life is pointless. She uses Joseph in this process to try and change her thoughts and manage her anger issues. Joseph see's the world bluntly, and tells it that way. "I thought Joseph would try to convince me that reality was actually fine and dandy and then try and adjust me to it, but he didn't do that...Instead he agreed with me cheerfully and at once." We see signs of the narrators "self-centeredness" after she is notified about Joseph's death and responds, "..what made him think he had the right to go climbing up a 60ft tree risking all our lives..?"

Joseph had numerous wives in his private life. I feel as though the Sin Eater is being compared to Joseph throughout the story. During his time with his patients, although they do not see it at the time, Joseph uses his time with them for his own personal gain to talk a lot. Is he in fact looking for a Sin Eater to clear out his own sins?

The Sin Eater itself was a person who would consume a meal in the presence of the recently deceased, thus removing their sins. As the story concludes the narrator has a dream in which Joseph and her are at an airport. As they are talking, the "first wife" of Joseph presents them with a plate of white, children's party cookies...the same cookies that the first wife brought to Joseph's funeral. These symbolize Joseph's sins. This is when the narrator realizes Joseph's imperfections (his sins).  "I look down at the plate again......maybe I could send it back, but I know this isn't possible."  Could the airport in fact represent the narrators mind? All the different people running around could be recognized as the narrators mind, all jumbled, now that Joseph is deceased and she has no one to talk too.

Activity: Four Summers

Everyone in "Four Summers" seems stifled by their environment and stuck where they are in life. In the narrator's case, this seems to result in her antipathy toward many of the other characters in the story (as well as her idolization of some of the other characters). Is this antipathy a necessary consequence of the lack of options available to these people?

By way of answering this question, choose any other character in the story and write a quick character sketch of Sissie from their perspective. Set your sketch in any one of the "four summers" depicted in the story, but be conscious of how this choice affects your work. As you write, you'll want to consider both how Sissie's appearance to others might differ from her self-perception and how a different personality type might deal with the constraints of this environment. 

Activity: The Sin Eater

In your groups, compose a list of facts we know about Joseph and facts we know or can infer about the narrator. Try to add at least ten items to each list, but adding more is great.

Once you have a couple of good lists, note the similarities and differences between the two characters. What do they have in common? What differences are potential (or realized) sources of conflict between the two characters? How do they overcome these differences in order to have a meaningful relationship? 

August 29 Reading Quiz

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Need A Sin Eat'a

         The Sin Eater is a story about a physician named Joseph who is compared to a Sin Eater. A Sin Eater is defined as someone who is paid to take out someone’s sins. Throughout the short story, we are able to identify the techniques the author uses to compare Joseph to the Sin Eater and how Joseph had more than just a patient-physician relationship with all of his patients.

            While reading the short story, we pick up on the fact that Joseph is only using his patients to get rid of his sins, thus making it seem as if he is looking for a Sin Eater himself. Even when the patients do not talk, Joseph will go on talking about himself. We see this when the author mentions, “If you won’t talk to him, he’ll bloody well talk to you, about the most boring things…He says he thinks it’s healthy for his patients to know he’s a human being too” (page 35). This gives the reader the idea that Joseph is himself looking for a Sin Eater. Furthermore, we see that Joseph is upset by a sin in his past. This sin refers to the little boy that Joseph talks about when he says, “I myself cherish an abiding hatred for the boy who lived next door to me…but if I ran into the little sod tomorrow I’d stick a knife into him” (page 39). Rather than listening to what his patients are having problems with, he talks to them about his sins.

            At points in the story, I felt as if Joseph was having more than just a patient-physician relationship with his patients. Towards the beginning of the short story, we see how Joseph seems to extremely “close” to his patients when the author states, “…ever, though he does try to help me on with my coat a bit to lingeringly” (page 35). We also see that he is not very serious about women in his life. We are told that he had three wives, of which all of them were fairly similar. This is seen when the author mentions, “The three wives have a family resemblance—they’re all blondish and vague around the edges...” (page 39). We see that Joseph seems to be interested in the same kind of women or women in general.

            After Joseph’s death, his second wife states, “He (Joseph) wasn’t happy.” The second wife inferred that Joseph committed suicide. If this holds true then Joseph clearly has issues in his own life. He was not happy about his sins, and could not find an outlet to get rid of these sins. I believe this may have been the driving force for him to commit suicide.

            This short story provides great room for analysis. As readers, we realize what Joseph’s true intentions are as he attempts to find a Sin Eater to eat his sins. We also become aware of how Joseph wanted more than a patient-physician relationship with his clients. Towards the end, the author has a dream in which Joseph offers her food and Joseph tells her that those are his sins. This is what engages the reader into identifying Joseph’s true character.

4 Summer 1 Fate

Joyce Carol Oates’ Four Summers follows Sissie and her family as they age and mature. The story takes place in the same lakeside tavern over four different summers throughout Sissie’s life.

The most revealing and pivotal scene in the story, in my opinion, is the fourth and final summer. As she sits in the bar, at this point married and pregnant, she gazes at her husband Jesse and notes “Jesse is young, but the outline of what he will be is already in his face.” (56) Through the first three summers at the bar, we see how Sissie and her brothers love for her parents turns into a confused state of hatred, primarily for her mother. So this line is rather shocking, reveling that although Sissie has grown up and learned much about her parent’s character through their interactions at this bar, she still is following the same path in which she despises.

During the first summer, Sissie and her brothers want nothing more then to go out on the lake in a rowboat. No matter how many times they ask, their Dad continually ignores them and pushes them away. He would rather drink and talk with the other people they are with. Toward the end of the first summer we learn that the lake is filled with some sort of “scum.” I interpreted the scum that fills the lake as a symbol and metaphor for alcoholism and side effects it brings upon Sissies’ family. This metaphor is played out as a bird becomes trapped in the scum and cannot free itself and fly away. One by one, kids begin throwing rocks at the bird, and Frank hits the bird on its head, ultimately killing it.

As her father continuously drinks, ignoring his children, we hear Jerry say “All he does is drink.. I hate him, I’d wish he’d die.” And we later learn that their Father dies and untimely death due to a factory accident. Sissie says “At night I hold Jesse, thinking of my father and what happened to him—all that drinking..” (55). Although the factory accident is not directly attributed to alcoholism, it can be inferred, and even it is not, Sissies’ fathers alcohol abuse pushed him further and further away from his kids.

Why does Sissie love Jesse if she sees the same qualities of her father in him that hurt their entire family? At one point Sissie even states “Why did I marry Jesse?” (55). Sissie herself is symbolically trapped in the scum of the lake, unable to fly away and free herself from a similar fate her parents faced. Despite the insight Sissie reveals through out the story and apparent maturity and understanding of her surroundings, we are left seeing her helplessly turn into her mother, like the bird stuck in the scum. 

-Harrison Bard

The Age When We Turn Into Our Parents

In Four Summers, Joyce Carol Oates depicts the same girl at four different ages during four different summers at the same lake and the same bar.  In the first three summers, the main character, Sissie, slowly hates the bar more and more.  Sissie has grown up watching her father get drunk, listening to her parents fight, and seeing her mother’s disdain for her own children and she seems to dislike all of it. 

After Sissie gets married she returns to the same tavern with her new husband and she is pregnant.  I would not have thought she would have wanted to return to that bar at all. While studying her husband, Jesse, she notes that “Jesse is young, but the outline of what he will be is already in his face…Their lives are like hands dealt out to them in their innumerable card games.” (56). When Sissie says “their” she is no longer just talking about Jesse but I assume her father as well.  When describing her father she says that “his jaws sag and there are lines in his neck-edged with dirt,” (51).  The assumption could be drawn that Jesse works in the same field as Sissie’s father and as Jesse ages he will become stressed with the job as well and it will show on his face.  Before Sissie’s father became so dependent on alcohol I would have thought he would have been like Jesse, young and in love with his new pregnant wife.  Similarities can also be drawn between pregnant Sissie and younger versions of Sissie’s mother in that they are both described as pretty when they were young. 

The environment that we grow up in shapes who we become.  No matter how much we dislike parts of our past we cannot get rid of them.  As humans we tend to stick with what is comfortable and familiar even if we hate it because we know that we can trust the outcome.  I predict that Jesse and Sissie will end up almost exactly like Sissie’s parents.  It is what they know adulthood to be like and it is what they will cling to as an example to shape their own adult lives.  Children who have parents who are alcoholics tend to have a higher chance of becoming an alcoholic themselves. Sissie, her parents and the rest of her family may not even realize that they are able to change the path their lives are on because it is all they know and it is all they have known.  In that sense we all grow up into the example that our parents left for us.

Sissie's Development Through the Years (Four Summers)

            In Joyce Carol Oates’ short story “Four Summers,” Oates employs a variety of themes, subjects, and styles, contributing to further analyses and point. The story is divided into four different segments, based on the main character’s maturity and development through the years, in a recurring setting of a family boathouse tavern. In each part of the story, Sissie, the narrator and observer, shows a different level of maturation through her evolving emotions towards different subjects, such as family, marriage, and life.

            Sissie's thoughts evolve from childlike wonder and innocent observation to influential realizations, such as observing her parents' appearances to realizing her parents' declining marriage. In Part III, Sissie has her first romantic encounter with an unknown man, gaining confidence as she embodies the personalities of her closest friends, but pushes the man away when she becomes uncomfortable. In this, though her thoughts are focused on convincing herself that she is capable of romantic interest, it is inferred that Sissie is not ready and that she needs more time to mature into a capable woman. Also in Part III, her thoughts about her family turn negatively as she comments on her mother, "In the photograph, she was pretty, almost beautiful, but I don't believe it. Not really. I can't believe it, and I hate her" (51).  Furthermore, Sissie states that her mother waits for her father to come home, to continue their quarrel, and that it never stops (52). 

            Because of these observations and life experiences, Sissie paints a negative picture of love and marriage. In Part IV, Sissie is pregnant and 'happily' married to Jesse, who reminds her of her father and his laugh and reflects upon the similarities between the two men of their "simple, healthy, honest" (55) personality and is convinced that those type of men generally lose everything. Sissie questions her marriage to Jesse and hopes that he will be different from her father in terms of marital relations. Based on her experience with her parents, she thinks that with her and Jesse's relationship, "it will subside someday, but nothing surprises me because I have learned everything. (55)" Just with the theme of free will, Sissie thinks that marriage is more of a duty in which both involved cannot free themselves.  She has to constantly remind herself that she is on her way to creating a great life with her husband. From the beginning, Sissie describes her life with her family in a negative light, which influences the way she matures and develops. 

Life After Joseph

           Losing someone you care about greatly and cares about you is an overwhelming feeling. One is left to deal with all of the holes that person left in your life and consider what they meant to you. The narrator in Margaret Atwood’s The Sin Eater is having such an experience throughout the short story after the death of Joseph. These thoughts and feelings come to a head during the last portion of the work when the narrator is describing the dream in which she sees Joseph.

            The narrator’s description of Joseph’s skin in the dream as blue is consistent with the description of Krishna, a reincarnation of an Indian deity, from her son’s magazine. Like the picture from the magazine Joseph was adored by many women and also sought after for advice. A previous wife of Joseph remembers that some of the people that he helped looked at him as a god. The dream means something more though. Since Joseph is depicted as similar to a reincarnation, the narrator hopes that he will be reincarnated. However, I believe that she is more rational than that. After all Joseph would say, “Dead is dead.” The narrator laments that after Joseph’s death she no longer has anyone to share her life with. This is the reincarnation she hopes to find: not Joseph himself, but someone of the same spirit with whom she can be open and truthful about her life and problems.

            The cookies from Joseph’s funeral show up again in her dream, this time as Joseph’s sins. In the story the narrator wonders what has happened to Joseph’s sins. At the funeral the narrator is upset that no sin eater has had a meal of “turnips and mash” that Joseph’s sins were transferred to. In the dream his sins are in foods that many people find much more appealing than turnips and mash: cookies that were earlier described to look like something made to please a child. This food choice suggests something about what the narrator thinks of Joseph. She believes that even his sins were not as severe as other peoples. Perhaps she has this belief because he spent so much of his time helping other people, perhaps not. In any case even in his death the narrator is able to place Joseph on a pedestal. She gets the one thing she desires also: the chance to help Joseph by eating his sins. Even though the narrator states that the plate of cookies was too big for her, she was willing to eat it because she knew it wasn’t possible to “send it back” even though she doesn’t end up having to in the dream. For all of the help he has given her, she is willing to help him. Being willing to help others is perhaps the greatest gift Joseph gave her and is a testament to how she feels about him.

Four Summers: An Illustration of a Stressed Mother-Daughter Relationship

Readers are introduced to Joye Carol Oates’s short story Four Summers by the narrator and protagonist Sissie, a young girl who is on vacation with her family at a lake. Throughout the story, which is broken into four segments that take place at the same lake over the course of many years, readers witness the life and maturing of Sissie.

One of the main themes of this story is family and its relationship and impact, especially in regards to how parents can influence their children. The large breaks in between sections of this story allow readers to witness the evolution of Sissie’s family and her character, which is important because the growing similarities between Sissie and her own mother are striking. For example, at the beginning of the story, Sissie describes her mother’s hair as “long and pretty” (43). In the final portion of the story, Sissie describes herself in a similar way. “My hair is long, down to my shoulders,” she pronounces. “I am pretty, but my secret is that I am pretty like everyone is” (54).

This is significant because, although she is pretty, Sissie does not seem satisfied with herself, which may be because of her stressed relationship with her mother that was blatantly referred to in the third section of the story, when Sissy is reflecting on a photograph she saw of her mother when she was younger. “In the photograph she was pretty, almost beautiful, but I don’t believe it,” explains Sissie to the readers. “Not really. I can’t believe it, and I hate her” (51).

The hatred that was once directed toward her mother eventually turns into self-hatred that, instead of being accepted, is manipulated into a false sense of contentment. “I let my hand fall onto my stomach to remind myself that I am in love,” Sissie concludes in the last paragraph of the story. “I am in love with our house and our life and the future and even this moment—right now—that I am struggling to live through” (56).

Breaking News: Science of Love

“A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud” is a cleverly written piece of literature by Carson McCullers. The story takes place in a café that is owned by a character named Leo. The plot starts to unravel when a young boy enters Leo’s café. The focus of the story quickly shifts when a man in the corner of the café calls the boy over. He tells the boy, “I Love You” (28). Confused, the boy is lured by his strangeness and listens to his story. The significance of the man talking to a young boy has to do a lot with the implied contrasts in the story (Age difference/ experience).  We quickly learn that the man has been abandoned by his wife for several years leaving his love stranded.

Throughout the story, the “stingy” (27) café owner interfered several times in their conversation implying that the man was crazy. It is obvious that the author did this on purpose to make the story a little bit more interesting. Overall, I would say that the central theme of the story is to love things that cannot be taken away from you. The man mentions, “Do you know how men should love? A tree. A rock. A cloud” (31).  It is evident that man seems to be depressed because the one thing that he loved left him when most needed her.

Over time, the man claims that he has discovered the “science of love” (29). In the text it says that the man examines a goldfish and falls in love with it. He basically learns to let go of things and starts to love the little things in life. The central theme of the story is portrayed through extensive character development. After analyzing this story, I noticed that the man is somewhat comparable to the actual setting itself. The café looks “bright” (27) from the outside, but in reality it seems like a very depressing environment just like the man.

-Prit Patel

Analyzing A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud (PJP)

In Carson’s McCullers’ story, A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud, we are introduced to a character who is experiencing the aftermath of his lost love. The overall theme of the story is explaining that love should be simple. The story first starts off when the old man tells the paperboy of his lost love. This scene in the story is important because it shows a grown man talking to a young boy about love. In perspective of the paperboy, this has to be an awkward situation because a random person is explaining his love life to him. In the story the man says, “Sit down and have a beer with me. There is something I have to explain” (26). The paperboy comes to the conclusion that the man might be a “lunatic” and has gone mad because of love.

The man begins his journey to “find his love”, however after reaching a certain point the man begins to deny that he was hurt by the divorce. The man says, “When I lay myself down on a bed and tried to think about her my mind became a blank. I couldn’t see her” (29). This means that he has mentally started to ignore the things that make him sad and he is starting to find better things to love. He is essentially starting to love the small things in life so that it could replace the love he once had for his wife. So the lesson that I think the man is trying to explain to the paperboy is that you should love things that cannot reject or hurt you.

The old man is using drinking as a way to channel his depression. He feels lonely and he wants someone to talk to. The man talks to the paperboy because he is a young boy who would be willing to stick around and listen to an adult. If it was another adult then the person probably would have left thinking he was crazy from what he had to say. So in conclusion, the story is about a man who learns to love the smalls things because he realized what happens when the love of your life leaves you.