The point of Mary McCarthy's C.Y.E. is that in adolescence, nicknames, rumors, and what other people think of us define who we are and how we perceive ourselves. In adulthood, the narrator walks by a sign for a store called "Cye Bernard" and it brings her back to memories of her childhood and the nickname she was given by two other girls in the Catholic boarding school. The nickname the two girls gave her affected her life in the boarding school and for a brief amount of time, her life in the public high school, but then she never heard the nickname again. During her time in the boarding school, she thought of herself as ambitious for wanting to be friends with the girls who gave her the nickname, but now in retrospect, she sees herself as naive.
The narrator decided to embrace the nickname of Cye, even though she did not have any idea what it meant, all the while planning her escape from the convent. When she was given the nickname, she finally saw that she could never fit in with the girls who gave her the nickname. She "could never, as I had hoped, belong to the convent's inner circles, not to the tier of beauty, nor to the tier of manners and good deportment which was signalized by wide moire ribbons, awarded once a week, blue, green, or pink, depending on one's age that were worn in a sort of bandolier style, crosswise from shoulder to hip," (183)
I think that everyone's life is defined by small moments in adolescence, whether it be nicknames, or school events, or small embarrassing moments which when you look back later on in life, they really were not such a big deal, but at the time, it was a defining moment of your life. Everyone thinks that who they are going to be in life is defined by who they are in high school when they are a teenager, but in reality, it isn't. As we grow up, we learn to see that there are bigger things in the world than what exists in the small ecosystem of a high school.
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