The problem with telling lies is that once one is told and explored in depth, it becomes hard to distinguish the truth from falsity. Thriving on details, lies eventually distort any sense of reality that still remains in one’s mind. A truth told could often hurt, but every lie created leads only to a state of delusion and unnecessary suffering. In “Our Other Sister,” Jeffrey Harrison examines the nature of lies and illuminates how the invention of a lie exists forever. Lies eat slowly away at the truth, swallowing everything that one once thought or believed. Through experience, Harrison discovers the burden of invention and is faced with the potential danger that lies possess. In “Our Other Sister,” Harrison uses analogies, contrast in view, …show more content…
Throughout “Our Other Sister,” contrasts distinguish the difference between reality and falseness, as well as pleasure and sorrow. In the first two stanzas of the poem, Harrison introduces the theme of lying by offering a contrast between two forms of cruelty, one of them causing immediate and brief pain, the other being the “cruelest thing I did to my younger sister” (1). Shooting his younger sister with a “homemade blowdart into her knee, / where it dangled for a breathless second” (2-3) does not even compare to the pain that was brought by the lie he would tell. This contrast stresses that this blowdart will only last for a terse moment, while a lie will last eternally in his sister’s mind. While the blowdart barely affects his younger sister physically, inventing a lie affects her mentally and on a much deeper scale. Harrison states, “we had / another, older sister who’d gone away. / What my motives …show more content…
Both Harrison and his sister are no longer part of reality, but are in the world created by the aimless mind of the speaker. But, maybe this world invented by Harrison is actually now part of their own reality. Harrison’s thought process, ignorant of such consequences, leads to state of no return. Feeling guilty to tell the truth, Harrison realizes that it is too late for him to try to change what has already been developed in his sister’s mind. Harrison writes, “But it was too late. Our other sister / had already taken shape, and we could not / call her back from her life far away / or tell her how badly we missed her” (27-30). It is at the point in the poem that Harrison uses a shift in tone to emphasize his state of being unaware of his motives to a state of understanding how much power words possess. Harrison states, “I can still remember / how thrilled and horrified I was / that something I’d just made up / had that kind of power, and I can still feel / the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart” (21-25). These lines illuminate the importance and influence of words. The metaphor of the blowdart not only brings the poem full circle, but also illustrates that the lie is too deep for any truth to oppose what has already been established. The blowdart that once shot “into her knee” is now stabbing Harrison “in the heart as I