Analysis Of Lust By Susan Minot

Lust is often confused with love. Lust is purely physical attraction, sexual desire, and has no lasting effect. “Lust” by Susan Minot, is a deep story that involves a teenage girl, who is helpless and emotionally removed. This faceless and nameless girl wanders about, sexually, for three years, having sex with more than fifteen boys and several others who are unnamed. The female is the main character of the story. The way the female character perceives sex differentiates from the way in which the guys she is sexually involved with perceive sex. The nameless girl thinks that she is giving love to the boys she interacts with, while they are purely in it for the sexual pleasure. Confusing love with lust is tragic in some cases and this could cause …show more content…
Minot purposefully spoke in detail from the mouth and thoughts of the teenage girl to illustrate just how one-sided the girl’s actions were. The teenage girl was introduced into the story without a name, physical description, and or any other characteristics that could give the reader any idea of what she was or how she looked as a person. The teenage girl spoke mainly on the guys she encountered rather than focusing on her own thoughts and feelings. For example, the girl describes a sexual encounter with a character named Roger. She says, “Roger was fast. In his illegal car, we drove to the reservoir, the radio blaring, talking fast, fast, fast. He was always going for my zipper. He got kicked out sophomore year” (Minot 244). The girl describes other encounters with characters, named Tim, Willie, and someone unnamed, in a provocative fashion by saying, “Tim’s was shaped like a banana, with a graceful curve to it. They’re all different. Willie’s like a bunch of walnuts when nothing was happening, another’s as thin as thin hot dog. But it’s like faces; you’re never really surprised” (Minot 250). The addition of these detailed descriptions of the boy’s counter-part conveys the young girl’s adolescent thinking and the extent of her raw innocence. She knows nothing of what she’s doing. She is being misled and she will have …show more content…
Love and lust are two different things, and they stand for two different meanings. Love is defined as an intense feeling of deep affection, a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone, and the most spectacular, indescribable, deep euphoric feeling for someone. Love is seen as positive emotion, and something that is warranted. Lust, on the other hand, is defined as just having a very strong sexual desire, often mistaken for love, and an intoxicating feeling one gets when around a member of the opposite sex one is attracted to, purely physically, with no emotional attachment. Lust is even recognized as a religious vice and more or so it carries a negative connotation. Lust describes just what the difference is between the young teenage girl’s thoughts and beliefs versus the boy’s thoughts and beliefs. The teenage girl indulges in fornication, but little does she know that she’s slowly relinquishing her proverbial innocence stroke by stroke. She doesn’t receive any love. She receives temporary emotional satisfaction, but as she says, “But then you’d start to slip from that and the dark would come in and there’d be a cave” (Minot 247). That cave reference is the realization that she’s nothing more than an object, that her place with these boys is nothing; they see her as a sexual object. She is a victim of lust. She’s searching for love, while she receives nothing more than a few