Susan Minot’s short story “Lust” depicts a female, teenage
narrator who experiences depression because of the amount of sexual activity in
her life. For people with depression, time tends to feel simultaneously drawn
out and compacted together. Therefore, to portray this depression, Minot
manipulates the story’s time in multiple ways. First, she uses short paragraphs,
some only one sentence long, and separates them with an extra space. These
breaks function to slow the story down. They also emphasize a jump between
thoughts and time within the narrative. Thus, the breaks become a pause in the
narrator’s thoughts, as though she is taking a breath as she remembers the
convoluted events of her sexual activity.
Secondly,
the thoughts are disordered, the subsequent paragraphs often not relating to one
another. For instance, the following sentences are the topic sentences of three
successive paragraphs:
You wait
till they come to you.
The girls
sit around in the common room and talk about boys, smoking their heads off.
I thought
the worst thing anyone could call you was a cock-teaser.
The paragraphs that follow each sentence remain on topic,
but there is no transition between them. Again, the double spacing is used to
indicate a jump in thought, showing that the narrator’s thoughts come at random.
Finally,
the narrator does not mention the boys she has been with in any significant
order, suggesting that she does not remember who came when. For example, she
first mentions Oliver on page two when she quotes her mother saying, “Oliver
seems nice.” Oliver is not mentioned again until page five; however, she talks
about eight other boys before returning to Oliver. This shows that she either
does not remember or does not care about the order. Thus, time for this
narrator has been warped, and Minot manipulates the text’s structure in order
to complicate time for the reader.
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