Research Links for "Say Yes"
Racism Or One Night in Marriage
Lying Down the Psychological Groundwork for Back in the World by Tobias Wolff
Part I Review of the different types of irony as they are evidenced in the stories
1. Naïveté or innocence like the wife in “Say Yes” or Krystal in “Desert Breakdown." Innocence is lost when the wives gain their Third Eye and realize they are better off alone, free from the symbiotic unhealthy dependence they have on their husbands.
The irony is that the weak role played by the woman hides the fact that the women are far stronger than the men.
In marriage, there is often a power struggle over the following:
spending money
spending time
deciding on relationships, family, friends
thinking about issues (who's right?)
assigning responsibilities
asserting control (don't do stuff behind my back)
What I've found is that over the years women have evolved to cater a man's ego while allowing the man to THINK he's in control when actually the woman is in control.
I remember a married woman told me how she gets her husband to take her out to dinner.
Another irony is that men are often full of bluster, a condition that hides their intractable Inner Baby.
Another irony in both stories is that the "weaker" wife is actually more sane than the husband and less dependent on him than he is on her even though he thinks she needs him. Men are expert at inverting reality. What's up is down and what's down is up.
2. Egotistical blindness that results in a refusal of accountability, self-introspection and creates an inflamed sense of entitlement in Mark like Peter and Donald in “The Rich Brother.”
The irony is that both Mark, Donald and Peter's sense of entitlement leaves them morally bankrupt and deprived of the power to change.
3. Narcissism, which results in delusions of grandeur like Mark in “Desert Breakdown.” This sense of grandeur is a facade feebly hiding that Mark's parents who "gave him everything" didn't give him what he really needed: guidance, structure, and discipline. Lacking those essential qualities, he is helpless, a cripple and deep down he resents his parents for not giving him what he really needed.
And this points to another irony: Mark's parents festooned him with gifts and bailed him out over and over, giving their son everything he wanted, but they didn't give their son WHAT HE NEEDED.
The irony is that the greater Mark's grandeur, the more he is accelerating toward his destruction.
4. Misguided good intentions—perhaps the wife in “Say Yes” thought she could “reform” her husband. But really she spoiled him and babied him (and seems to do so in a semi-comatose autopilot) like Mark's parents spoiled him.
In fact, the wife has been spoiling and enabling her husband, but his racist comments opened a window to his soul from which it appears she is forever repelled. This makes sense because a person cannot comptartmentalize or isolate his racism from other facets of his personality. The racism, which is part of his bull-headed ignorant, stubborn attitude, bleeds through everything he does.
5. Misguided ambition—Leo in the “Missing Person” aspires to a “spiritual life” for which he has no aptitude. The more he tries to be spiritual, the more he finds he is a man of the material world and there lies the irony.
Another irony: Leo is more real when he is his created persona Slim.
6. Unconscious fear—Leo withdrawals into the church because of his fear of women, heartbreak, intimacy and in a general sense a fear of the world. In many ways the story “The Missing Person” is about the power of corruption for transforming our lives for the better—if we react to corruption in a way that makes us stronger, not weaker. To borrow a clichéd quote from Nietzsche, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
7. Wishful thinking—it’s human nature to want to believe that things aren’t as bad as we suspect they are. Perhaps this is the case of the wife in “Say Yes” and Krystal in “Desert Breakdown.”
8. Oversimplistic view of the world that causes us to look at the surface without peeling the outer layer and seeing the complexities, contradictions, paradoxes, and enigmas that lie underneath. Peter is guilty of not seeing his own contradictions that make him addicted to playing the Mother role to his brother.
9. Having parents, a spouse, a boyfriend, a girlfriend or other enablers who bail us out every time we sink so that we develop a false sense of security and feel free to pursue our delusions with impunity like Mark in “Desert Breakdown.”
10. Money can give us a false sense of security and invincibility so that we can assert our most destructive, grotesque aspects of our personality and think we can get away with it—like Peter in “The Rich Brother.”
Part II: “Back in the World” Moments in which you're ability to see the irony of your situation becomes your Third Eye:
Hopefully, all of us will have a “back in the world” moment, that defining instance in which we take our heads out of our proverbial butts and see reality for what it really is:
1. You wake up one morning and realize your boyfriend or girlfriend is the devil and you can’t believe you spent all these months, maybe even years, jumping through hoops to stay in the relationship.
2. You wake up one morning and realize you need to move out of your parents’ house. They provide love, security, and support, but you're dying.
3. A fat guy got the lap band procedure, got skinny but he has acid reflux and bad breath.
4. A woman planned her divorce before she got married.
5. A personal trainer makes a good living charging clients who never build the motivation to exercise and eat a healthy diet.
The Back in the World Moment in "Say Yes"
The husband's refusal to say yes in regards to marrying his wife if she were black makes the wife go back into the world in several ways.
One. The husband's reliance and dependence on cultural bias as a way of belonging to his tribe remains unquestioned and reveals him as an emotional child who lacks the independence of mind and courage to question why he thinks the way he does. In other words, he behaves blindly and stubbornly in all things and this puts a larger question at work for the wife: What is the meaning of my marriage?
Two. The wife suddenly needs to know: Are me and my husband playing empty roles? Are we playing house? Is our life merely a facade?
Three. The wife suddenly sees something hideous about her marriage: Oh my God. We live as a couple but it's all fake. We don't really know one another. We've been sleepwalking through life, going through the motions with our heads up our butts. I'm simply his "white" wife, an illusion.
Four. This marriage has no real intimacy or understanding. It's simply a domestic hell and I've acclimated to it successfully until now because I've been blind to its real status and substance.
Five. If my husband can't see me as a person and not a "white wife," then he doesn't love me for the real me but loves me as a superficial add-on, a trophy, a prop for his ideal image. How do I face him when I see my marriage for the farce that it is?
Five. The veil of my phony marriage has been lifted. The toothpaste is out of the tube and I can't put it back. What do I do now? I may be capable of change, but is my husband?
Six. The wife is revolted or disgusted by her husband. There's no going back. The marriage is over. We all have a Disgusting Experience that cuts off a relationship. I had one that I'll call the Snuggles Incident.
Seven. When it comes to race, thinking people realize that race is not a biological fact. Rather, race is 3 things:
1. It's a social construction.
2. It's random.
3. It's based on perception, not reality.
If the husband in the story received a letter telling him his wife has 10% African blood, what would he do? What if the letter stated she had 5%? What's his "cut-off" line? There isn't one. It's arbitrary.
The Need for Parallel Structure in Your Thesis and All Your Writing
Examples of Faulty Sentence Structure
The wife's back in the world moment consists of seeing her husband's racism, identifying his ignorance of who she really is, and to see his stubborn refusal to change.
"to see" should be replaced with "seeing"
To repair her marriage, the couple would be well advised to confront their sleepwalking existence, to acknowledge that they have been living not as one but as strangers in the same house, admitting they have not been listening enough to one another.
Replace "admitting" with "to admit"
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