Appetite By Saïd Sayrafiezadeh Analysis

Looking into the story, “Appetite,” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, the story is an extremely melancholic and horrendous description of the past and present life of a man after high school. The unnamed protagonist, obtained a job working at a restaurant with a starting salary of $4.50 an hour. When he was nineteen years old, his work at the restaurant had begun. By his twenty-fifth birthday, he was raised to making $7.50 an hour, and where the story starts he wanted a raise from $8 to $10 an hour. The man was currently making only $8 an hour at the age of most likely twenty-six years old. He is set to make only $16,640 for an annual salary according to his work schedule in the story. “Appetite,” relates to me on a personal level because as someone who

This friend was a taxi driver and boasting about the fact that he was as old as a quarter of a century. The man thought to himself, “When I’m a quarter of a century, I won’t be driving a taxi.” (Sayrafiezadeh, Page 6) This was an example of a situational irony because the man thought was that he was going to be successful by the time he was twenty-five, but he was going down an equally awful path. He was making only $7.50 an hour, which could have easily been less than what a taxi driver made.The fact that the man felt that by the age he would be twenty-five years old, he would be onto brighter things. The narrator, who is the man then went on to say, “I had dreams of grandeur. I didn’t know how to get there, but I knew that it would work out.” (Sayrafiezadeh, Page 6) Having dreams of grandeur literally means that he had dreams of becoming of high rank or social importance, but he did not know how it was going to happen for him, he just knew it would. The fact that this man did not become of high rank means that you should not just sit around and wait for things to happen for you. That distinct part of “Appetite,” really made me think about how there are countless amounts of people living like that, expecting things to happen, but when reality strikes, most of the time, you do not become something special without taking charge of your life. Like this man and most other people, I also have “Dreams of grandeur,” I do not want the life I am living to become a waste of time. What is the purpose of life, if you are not living to your max potential? My father tells me a very specific saying that I use to become the best I can be possibly. He says, “Luke, you do not want to be forty-five years old, sitting in an apartment all alone watching Netflix on a holiday like Thanksgiving, or Christmas, thinking