The Death of Justina

" I thought suddenly of the neglected graves of my three brothers on the mountainside and that death is a loneliness much crueler than any loneliness hinted at in life. The soul (I thought) does not leave the body, but lingers with it through every degrading stage of decomposition and neglect, through heat, through cold, through the long winter nights when no one comes with a wreath or a plant and no one says a prayer." (Cheever 542)

It is hard to distinguish whether Cheever or the character is a more grim philosopher. The speaker makes it blatently obvious that they are not religious or believe in any sort of afterlife. The black and white picture the other day during the slide show with the man in a suit sitting at a table and looking like a sad clown is an image brought to mind when trying to visualize the character. This eternal loneliness that he talks about seems to be the reason why him and so many others fear death more than any kind of mortal tourment. Honestly, as if living in a corupt, homogolous society that we can't escape isn't tourment enough, but writers are selfish enough to preserve that misery and deppression in black and white. This is the stuff that nowadays kids go Emo over, so why induce that kind of pain in readers? I'm not saying that this was not a good story. As a matter of fact these short stories that we have been reading lately have been phenomonaly good. But does human pessimism, which I am guilty for as well, run so deep that we want everyone happier than us to feel our misery? That happy people who happen to be well read enough to read these stories of suburban hell should be forced into being miserable so that everyone can feel the same? If anything I should think that that would reinforce that mortal tourment that the speaker was talking about. But what is there to do? At least emo kids have something to read.


"When I abstain from sin it is more often a fear of scandal than a private resolve to improve on the prity of my heart, but here was a call for abstinence without the worldly enforcement of society, and death is not the threat that scaldal is." (Cheever 542)

How sadly true does this quote ring? Nowadays people's mantalities about consequence, cause and effect, is based on what the act will have on what people think of them. Other ramifications of their actions are not their problem, as long as they get what they want. If anyone has the decency to try to better themselves, it is done and carried out for selfish reasons, which ultimately does not make the person better because they never really changed anywhere anything other than some superflous habit.


"I seemed to hear the jingle bells of the sleigh that would carry me to grandmother's house, although in fact grandmother spent the last years of her life working as a hostess on an ocean liner and was lost in the tragic sinking of the Lorelai and I was responding to a memeory that I had never experienced." (Cheever 545)

This ties into the whole picturesque Suberban lifestyle idea. He's reminiscing about a stereotype, a dream that thousands of people have had but never actually done. I think its kind of funny, I've had similar daydreams. I was on my way to a funeral, so me and my family were dressed nicely and belted into the Volvo. My sister Irena was brushing her hair in the car, and my other sister Becky hadn't had that idea. We were passing a strawberry field and a homemade billboard said 'pick your own'. Suddenly I was enveloped in a fake memory of dazzling sunlight and warm strawberries, where my parents sat being boring on a blanket and Irena dropped a basketful of berries and got mad, and so Becky tried to pick the rest of them herself, and magically her hair was brushed. Then I was pulled out of faux deja vous, and slammed back into the finger covered car window. I had shamefully remembered that I had not seen any of those things at all, just fallen back into something that I read once.

"Above me on the hill was my home and the homes of my friends, all lights and smelling of fragrant wood smoke like the temples in a sacred grove, dedicated to monomamy, feckless childhood and domestic bliss, but so like a dream that I felt the lack of viscera with much more than poignance- the absence of that inner dynamism we respond to in some European landscapes." (Cheever 545)

I agree with Cheever, I've yet to see a suburban neighborhood that didn't dissapoint me. Those ugly rows of houses that you pass on the highway are otherworldly. It would make you claustraphobic to think that a completely differnet family lives in every black roofed building dotting the horizon, some of their lives crossing only when they groggily stumble out of their houses to get the newspaper or some other little thing of insignificance, and they give a polite wave to their neighbor whose doing the same thing as them. If you go for a drive early in the morning to get bagels, pick up an early shift at work or whatever you do, stop the car on the highway and watch the swatch of houses to the sidelines, and watch to see the monogamy that Cheever is talking about in this story. There is only so much you can get out of a book, and no matter what anyone says you learn best when you have seen and done things for yourself.