“Mom might never be caught without batteries or tissues, but she just calls me Ashleigh- a name she doesn’t even like- and never promised me anything.” P.1. Ashleigh’s dad is in a tough financial spot because of a deal he made, and after hearing the situation she realizes that she needs to lend him some of her mom’s money. The story “Ashes” by Susan Beth Pfeffer leaves Ashleigh’s decision to be inferred by the reader using the text evidence.
Ashleigh’s Betrayal Ashleigh is faced with a mind-numbing decision. In the short story Ashes, by Susan Beth Pfeffer, Ashleigh is a young girl with divorced parents. When her dad asks her to take money from her mom to get him out of debt, Ashleigh has to choose. She can either betray her mother and steal her emergency money or leave her father in a desperate situation. The story ends before this conflict can be resolved, yet the unrevealed ending is clear.
After another evening of her parents arguing and interrogating her she runs to her haven, her bedroom where she attempts to suicide “pitifully”. “I open up a paper clip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. [...] I draw little windowcracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.” , she even treats her attempt a suicide “pitiful”.
Janice Mirikitani is a very accomplished poet, who has written a beautiful poem called “Suicide Note”, this poem is about a young Asian American student who has committed suicide in 1987 because she has suffered a lot of problems throughout her life because of her parent’s treatment. Mirikitani describes how the young girl writes this sad letter to her parents because she wants to apologize for them for not being the perfect girl in college. Also the young girl is apologizing to her parents for being a girl not a boy as they want because as she thinks that they would be happy if she is a son. The young girl thought that she does not deserve to be alive, or maybe her parents think that. Even though, she has worked very hard all of her life.
Thoughts in regards to suicide often include empathy for the dead, and wonder as to what drove the person to end their life. All too often, people ignore a rather important consideration: the thoughts and feelings of those left behind. The loved ones are left with the remorse, despondence, and grieving, while the dead are absolved of their worldly anguish. In “The Grieving Never Ends”, Roxanne Roberts employs a variety of rhetorical tactics including metaphors, imagery, tone, and syntax to illustrate the indelible effects of suicide on the surviving loved ones. Roberts effectively uses metaphors to express the complex, abstract concepts around suicide and human emotion in general.
On page 19 in the readings of The Teenage Wasteland Suburbia’s Dead-End kids. She states “But I still wonder, at what point are people pushed over the line?” Again, Individuals see it one point of view. Yet she sees it in another. She sees that the suicides were an expectation for something better, a way out.
. . or she was just giving me enough rope to hang myself.” The disconnect from the outside world, and the use of suicidal language show depression. This is a large contributor to the reader’s mood of depression. Steven, instead of working on his homework and paying attention, loses focus in class, and spaces out.
The short story “Ashes” ,by Susan Beth Pfeffer, is about a girl named Ashleigh, nicknamed Ashes, who has a mother who thinks everything through and has a plan for everything. However, Ashe’s father is a very laid back man who is divorced from Ashe’s mom. But is Ashe’s father trustworthy? One lesson in the short story “Ashes” that is suggested is you can not always trust the people closest to you. Ashes is clearly not happy when her father brings her to his house because a lot of things she does is very non-interested and she thinks different from what she says to him.
The Program is a fictional book set in a dystopian world where teens are incredibly susceptible to depression and are very high-risk for committing suicide, this causes their society’s government to go to extreme measures to prevent the premature death of an entire generation. Young uses the narrator of this book to stress the importance of freedom of speech and voicing your opinions. Suzanne Young was born in New York before moving to Arizona where she got a degree in creative writing, with her degree she published her first book of The Program and has since completed the series as a trilogy. I chose to read this book because it deals with a contemporary issue that our society is currently facing, suicide, as well as showing a strong example
A short story by Luisa Valenzuela “All About Suicide” is a story that will leave you guessing, wondering what will happen next. You will think to yourself did I read that correctly? Even though Luisa Valenzuela clearly is trying confuse people I believe there is one clear conclusion, looking at all the details in the story I believe what happened was a homicide. Ismael killed the minster, but he knows he is going to get caught in the end so basically he is dead too.
“This was another of our fears, that life wouldn’t turn out like literature”. Suicide is a very serious issue that is address in this novel. Not only did one of Tony’s close friends commit suicide but two. Noticing a pattern, I also realize
Everywhere she goes, suicide is on her mind. A few times, Esther actually attempted to kill herself, to no avail of course. She becomes desperate and says, “...I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and time again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left…” (130). Esther feels, not only isolated from society and the real world, but detached from her own physical being as well.
Throughout this treatment, she becomes much more interested in suicide and seems completely focused on coming up with a plan that will work. In one introspective moment, she explains that “Lately I had considered going into the Catholic Church myself. I knew that Catholics thought killing yourself was an awful sin. But perhaps, if this was so, they might have a good way to persuade me out of it” (Plath, 1971, p. 164).
As a critic Demastes points out, “The physical loss of life involved in Jessie’s suicide has perhaps been overemphasized by too many critics. By analyzing Jessie’s epilepsy, one should look more abstractly at the suicide being an act of a woman choosing, in one final gesture, to take control of her destiny, especially in the light of the fact that she has already spiritually lost her
As a result, teen suicide is the third leading cause for all deaths among teens aged 15-19. Teens suicide attempts and completions have steadily been on the rise since 2000. Surveys have found that 25% of high school and 10% of college students have seriously considered suicide sometime in their life. Therefore, any teen who mentions anything about suicide should be taken seriously.” (Reed) Frala 2
