Are We All Cursed?

Titles are important to any analysis of a literary work. They give the readers clues about symbols, character, or theme. At the end of his short story, “The Curse,” Dubus states “The curse moved into his back and spread down and up his spine, into his stomach and legs and arms and shoulders until he quivered with it. He wished he were alone so he could kneel to receive it.” In your opinion, what is the “curse” Mitchell receives? Post your ideas here.

BONUS POST:

You all seemed to like discussing these pieces so much I added an extra Severance post.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6363905

Listen to the October 2006 interview with Robert Olen Butler about his novel, Severance. What insider information did you glean from the interview? How does listening to the author’s reading of the piece help you imagine the final moments of the Dragon slain by St. George? There are also five more readings on the same web page, including the author’s own imagined “severance”. Post your thoughts on the contemplation of the incomprehensible – death.

“Six Pieces of Severance” from the magazine Glimmer Train

Reflect on Jacob Russel’s blog commenting on reading Severance by Robert Olen Butler.

“I was a young man, hardly more than an adolescent, when I first reflected on a curious inconsistency in the ways I thought about death. On the one hand, stated as a fact, an item of knowledge, that we are all going to die, myself included; how was it possible that I could state this fact--given the existential enormity of the subject----alone or in company...with complete indifference? Why should this idea have so little affective resonance? We have no knowledge of death, no experiential knowledge, I told myself. In that light, there was no reason that an idea, absent of content--a mere word, in effect, should make one anxious. What then, I had to ask, was I to make of those brief moments of absolute terror: waking at night to an absence, a black hole that seemed to have replaced the world, and was, perhaps, it's true reality?” http://jacobrussellsbarkingdog.blogspot.com/2008/01/review-robert-olen-butler-severance.html

Can you explain Russel’s “indifference” to the idea of death? How does Butler help us gain knowledge of something which “we have no knowledge of”? What are your thoughts, reflections, curiosities on the idea of death?