For Esme With Love And Squalor by JD Salanger
For Esme With Love And Squalor by JD SalangerWar is a very traumatic experience; soldiers are lucky to emerge alive, let alone mentally sound. In the short story, “For Esme With Love And Squalor” by JD Salanger a story is told of a man who becomes mentally ill after the war. The man, X, meets a young girl at a coffee shop and learns how mature she was and how important her watch is to her. After the war, X suffers from post traumatic stress syndrome, it was not until he receive Esme’s gift that he was saved from permanent insanity.
X meets Esme in a coffee shop just to the outskirts of a military base. X had previously noticed her in a church during a choir practice, she stood out from the other young people “Her voice was distinctly separate from the other children’s voices” (Salanger 90). Later, when she meets him in the coffee shop she just walks over to him, a mere stranger. They have a casual yet deep conversation about their histories. X is extremely impressed with her large vocabulary that possibly exceeded his own. X notices the oversized manly watch that was around this small girl’s wrist “I happened to be looking at her enormous faced, chronographic-looking watch”(Salanger 100). He learns that she lived a very difficult life when she replies solemnly looking at the wrist watch, “He gave it to me just before Charles and I were evacuated” (Salanger 100) She explains that her deceased father had given it to her and that it had great sentimental value.
In this short story X writes Esme a story, he changes the tone of the tale “This is the moving or squalid part of the story” (Salinger 103). At this point, he tries to conceal his identity “I’ve disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest of readers will fail to recognize me”(Salanger 103). This shows that he chooses to hide his identity because he is ashamed of what he has done and it is a way of detaching himself in an attempt to forget or evade his past. He disguises himself X so no one will be able to figure out whom the story was about. During the war, X goes insane and he changes significantly from the beginning of the story. X suffers from shell shock. After the war ended X was tormented by many symptoms of post traumatic stress syndrome “He had been chain smoking for weeks”, “His gums bled at the slightest pressure of the tip of his tongue”, “He felt his...
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