Elizabeth Robertson: Outside Reading-She's Come Undone

"She's Come Undone" is a novel by Wally Lamb that I read this summer about a girl who's life is filled with hardships. Something about this book just got to me. It was like I was rubbernecking at a really really bad car accident. That sounds so horrible but I really can't think of a better way to describe it. That story made my heart ache. Something in particular that I really loved about it was the really weird symbolism. Her whole life, the girl was extremely fat and was compared to a whale. Towards the last quarter of the book, when she is older, she makes a trip to the sea where there is a strange phenomenon of whales beaching themselves and basically committing suicide, because they cannot get back to the water. That night, she strips herself naked and swims in the water and looks the whale in the eye, because its head was in the water. Then she tries to drown herself but does not succeed. This symbolism of death is very powerful, because like the whale, she tries to kill herself. It is also symbolic because she is seemingly trapped her whole life by her weight. She is ridiculed and simply can't do a lot of things. In the same way, the whale is trapped by its weight because it cannot get back in the water. But at the end of the book, after she has finally lost a significant amount of weight, and she is by this time forty, she and her husband go on a whale watching tour. The whole tour, no one sees any whales, and she is very disappointed. She goes out to the deck by herself when no one else is there, and after a minute of watching, she sees a whale jump up in the air, and its tail splashes the whole deck. The aliveness of the whale, and her excitement is so representative of new life. The whale is not dead, and neither is she. She is alive and new, no longer constricted by her weight and her past hardships that for so long held her back. Read this book if you get a chance!