Simone de Beauvoir’s “Monologue” is the verbal outcry of a lonely and bitter woman who is alone one New Year's Eve, caught between the disdain for the partygoers whose voices seep through her walls, and the despair of the silence which would engulf her when they stop. Her lifetime of frustration, which has been kept locked away, has finally broken free in a upsetting manner. Murielle is a self-described victimized late forties woman, divorced mother who has a prominent obsessive compulsive need for cleanliness, both physically and mentally; and she is consumed by her delusions and jealousy for the love and sexual desire of another. She is spiteful towards those, who in her opinion, have betrayed her and is continuously tortured by what
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The opening sequence begins with, “The monologue is a form of her revenge” (249), and that isn’t in conjunction with the first-person perspective that follows with the rest of the story. It’s a warning that everything Murielle says is her intentions of seeking revenge. From the beginning, the sentences do not obey standard form. Many go on without punctuation and the paragraphs drag on, basically making the whole story unreadable. The lack of breaks and disjointed narration of Murielle’s thoughts create tension and anxiety, producing a fast pace read, obstructing the reader’s time to reflect on the actual meaning of the story, at times sinking the reader into the madness that the character is obviously …show more content…
Murielle’s narcissistic personality and cruelty towards her family, and her failure at motherhood and the world that surrounds her become more and more outlandish, such as, “A million children have been massacred so what? Children are never anything but the seed of bastards… If I was the earth it would disgust me, I’d shake it off. I’m quite willing to die if they all die too…” (258), making the reader having compassion to Murielle’s destructive personality considerably harder.
In the “Monologue” Beauvoir cleverly uses the form of a ‘stream of consciousness’ and a rambling monologue to display the mental illness of Murielle, and her cognitive self-destruction on a New Year's night. Successfully creating a negative interpretation of how some women perceive themselves as victims, and to project the reader into the experience of Murielle’s intensity of feelings to the point of understanding how this can happen based on her mental state this New Year’s
The opening sequence begins with, “The monologue is a form of her revenge” (249), and that isn’t in conjunction with the first-person perspective that follows with the rest of the story. It’s a warning that everything Murielle says is her intentions of seeking revenge. From the beginning, the sentences do not obey standard form. Many go on without punctuation and the paragraphs drag on, basically making the whole story unreadable. The lack of breaks and disjointed narration of Murielle’s thoughts create tension and anxiety, producing a fast pace read, obstructing the reader’s time to reflect on the actual meaning of the story, at times sinking the reader into the madness that the character is obviously …show more content…
Murielle’s narcissistic personality and cruelty towards her family, and her failure at motherhood and the world that surrounds her become more and more outlandish, such as, “A million children have been massacred so what? Children are never anything but the seed of bastards… If I was the earth it would disgust me, I’d shake it off. I’m quite willing to die if they all die too…” (258), making the reader having compassion to Murielle’s destructive personality considerably harder.
In the “Monologue” Beauvoir cleverly uses the form of a ‘stream of consciousness’ and a rambling monologue to display the mental illness of Murielle, and her cognitive self-destruction on a New Year's night. Successfully creating a negative interpretation of how some women perceive themselves as victims, and to project the reader into the experience of Murielle’s intensity of feelings to the point of understanding how this can happen based on her mental state this New Year’s