Life Changing Experiences And Unfulfilled Wishes

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Life Changing Experiences and Unfulfilled Wishes In each story the narrators have a life altering experience that changes the direction in which their lives are heading. “The Lifeguard” was a short story about a youth in his last summer at home before going away to college. In “The Lifeguard” the life changing experience, according to the narrator, was how he viewed the beaches that he once watched over as a lifeguard in his youth. The narrator speaks of his change in the last sentence of the story when he says “and I’ve never seen the water or the umbrellas of summer in the same way again” (431). ` “The Management of Grief” is also a story that is about a life altering experience. In this story the narrator is a married woman of Indian decent that is living in Canada. The narrator picks her story up, in her home, shortly after a plane carrying a large number of Canadian Indians has been bombed over Ireland. The narrator then travels to Ireland to identify her families bodies, and then home to India to bury the dead; it is while in India that the narrator visits a Himalayan village filled with a tribe of animists and while there she has a spiritual vision of her husband who tells her “you must finish alone what we started together” (442). Back in Canada, the narrator feels that her family is still with her, and even thinks to herself “How do I tell Judith Templeton that my family surrounds me,and that like creatures in epics, they’ve changed shapes” (444). Then at the end ofthe story the narrator’s life changing experience is complete when she hears her families voice one last time tell her “Your time has come,” “Go, be brave” (447). Then the narrator begins a journey with an unknown destination. ` ` While in each of these stories the narrator

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