Section 2 ELIC

This section of the reading was a little bit hard for me to understand because I didn’t really know who was talking at the time since the author kept switching the narrator every couple of pages. I have some clarifying questions though. On page 83, it says, “Sometimes I would think about those hundred letters laid across my bedroom floor. If I hadn’t collected them, would our house have burned less brightly?” I was wondering who said that. Was it Anna and did she die in the fire? Is that why the grandfather married her younger sister and misses her so much? Another question is why did the author keep saying “what time is it?” on some of the pages that separated the section into different parts?

At the end of the section, when the grandfather was describing how he had wrote everywhere, for example on parts of his apartment and his body, I thought that was a powerful way to show how much he wanted to talk to his wife to explain his actions and why he is leaving, even though “there’s too much to express.” (132) It showed that it is really hard to express one’s feelings in a certain situations.   The part right after that made me a little more emotionally attached to the book. He was saying sorry for everything that he had done and everything that he was going to do. “I’m sorry for what I’m about to do your mother and to you.” (132). This part made me sad because he knows what he is doing is wrong, but he still has to do it anyway. This connects to the grandfather’s comment about wishing he could have two lives. By leaving his wife when he still loved her, it revealed that he still wishes that he could stay with his wife and carry on their life together, but he wants to start something new. His thoughts about having two lives stems from his loss of a loved one, Anna.