Look Me In The Eye Analysis

In his moving and inspirational memoir, Look Me in the Eye: My Life With Asperger’s, John Elder Robison depicts his struggles in life to readers. From a child, not comprehending why his understanding of “normal” was different than everyone else’s, to an adult, finally learning that he had Asperger’s, Robison conveys the inner workings of his mind. As a very personal topic, I imagine revealing one’s whole life would be very hard to write about. Robison includes all the tragedies, struggles, and successes in his life throughout this memoir. After reading, it is clear that Robison decided to share his life with Asperger’s to help others with the condition better understand the world and feel they’re not alone. He also helps reveal to others how challenging it can be to live in …show more content…
On one end, he would write in short sentences, creating a fast pace, like that of the mind of someone with Autism. On the other end, he wrote long, descriptive sentences that described the whole process his brain went through to decide how to react to something or come to a decision. From the memoir, “Someone got killed. Wow! I’m glad I didn’t get killed. I’m glad Varmint or my parents didn’t get killed. I’m glad all my friends are okay. He must have been a pretty dumb kid, playing on the train tracks. I would never get run over by a train like that. I’m glad I’m okay. At the end, I smiled with relief,” (pg. 30) shows Robison’s way of reacting when someone mentioned that a child was killed. Smiling at a comment like that would be taken as extremely rude, but in this quote Robison explains how in his mind, he was just thinking about how he was glad that he and all his friends and family were okay. Robison also creates a connection with the reader with vernacular diction throughout the memoir. He retells his story with, in a way, some comedic twist as halts the story temporarily to talk directly to the