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Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

1397 Words6 Pages

Death is everywhere. One cannot escape its fatal grips. In Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, death is everywhere and absolute. Although Super Sad True Love Story is a futuristic novel and a satire on contemporary culture, it is also a novel that explores the concept of death, as well as people’s relationship to death (e.g. denial and acceptance). The novel presents two options that a person can take when facing death. 1). Try to escape the inevitable by running from or cheating death, or 2.) Accept your fate and live your life the best way you can knowing that death will come. Super Sad True Love Story argues for the second option by demonstrating the horrendous consequences of the first option. The novel shows that even though death …show more content…

The reader is provided an example of how the society in this novel handles what it deems unacceptable when Lenny and Eunice walk in Central Park on her first day living with Lenny, and they spot multiple people that became homeless because “they were kicked out of their homes along the highway” since “the Bipartisans don’t want [the country] to look poor in front of [their] Asian creditors” (113). Just like the people kicked out of their homes and, unfortunately, stuffed away and hidden from the front lines, death is stuffed away from most of the minds living in Shteyngart’s society; however, death finds a way to not be ignored. The National Guard decides to annihilate the homeless Low Net Worth Individuals living in Central Park, including the bus driver Lenny and Eunice saw earlier in their walk in the park. The images of the massacre that were shown on Lenny’s äppäräti had shocked him to the point that it “took [him] several moments to come up with a description of what [he] was seeing - a dead man” (156). This event can be interpreted as an awakening for Lenny. He attempted to hide from death and ignore its existence the best he could, but he forced to confront its eventuality when watching in horror the images of someone he had met, who was supposed to be tucked away from the public, lying dead in a gruesome fashion. Death cannot be

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And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering be- tween life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.”

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Intro: Sometimes in life we are given a choice. Some make us happy, some we regret , and others are the most difficult decisions we will ever have to make. We all live our lives fully aware that at some point we will end up dying just like everybody else in the world no matter how much we avoid addressing the fact. You wake up everyday with the routine you have created for yourself, until you hit an unexpected bump. You have six months to live.

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