IND-AFF Or Out Of Love In Sarajevo

The story “IND AFF or Out of Love in Sarajevo” by Fay Weldon focuses on a twenty-five-year-old college student, who has confused academic ambition with love towards her professor, Peter. She wants to go to the next step and build a relationship with Peter since she believes in her heart that she has fallen in love with him because she is mesmerized by his knowledge, charm, and loving skills. While Peter continues to contemplate on who it is that he wants to be with between his wife of twenty-four years and his student, him and the student decided to go on a trip to Sarajevo where after a while she becomes more mature and then comes to her senses and realizes that she is not truly in love with Peter but only in love with his intellectuality and manliness.

So, within the story, the character, Peter, is a dull, forty-six-year-old professor who indulges in constant complaining and is depicted as a pessimistic, indecisive, and corrective character towards culture and his student. These depictions come from the way Peter carries himself with the way he sees things in a certain aspect, the different

As Peter began to show himself as a character throughout the story, his characteristic of being pessimistic can be analyzed as existential due to the pessimism being existent within himself as a character. At viewing the infamous footprints of Princip, Peter comments “Come all this way… and you can’t even see the footprints properly, just two undistinguished puddles” (Weldon 202). This shows his pessimism as a person because his student was highly interested and intrigued by the view of the actual footprints from Princip but instead he showed as if he did not care about how she felt about the viewing, only about how the footprints are not fully visible. In this sense, Peter and his student both had two different interpretations (Tannen 2001) of the visibility of the