Lust by Susan Minot
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Lust is having a self-indulgent sexual desire. Susan Minot portrayed the mind of a promiscuous high school female perfectly. Lust is powerful and seductive, but its inherently selfish and opposed to love. For many girls who are having sex with different boys they can identify with the desire to be needed. The characters in “Lust” are written in a way to highlight the dysfunction and disconnection of everyone involved. The narrator herself is nameless and faceless, making the reader believe that she has already somehow disappeared, just as the men in her life have made her disappear after having sex. Similarly, the men are listed in a brief and are identified only by their sexual acts or by other, easily objectified characteristics. What makes the story sad is the girl knows she is basically nothing. Many people who have casual sex start to feel this way, there is usually something missing in their lives. While reading the story I kept asking myself “where are her parents” after realizing that she is in boarding school things suddenly became clear.
Our narrator is very free with her sexuality reminded me of women from the sixties and seventies. After reading she had sex at a Rolling Stones concert and different song from that era my assumptions were correct. The environment around her boarding school sounds very green and rustic. Maine or Upstate New York where there are trees and a lot of wealthy families who can send their children to exclusive schools. When parents send their children away to boarding school they have to realize that no matter how prestigious the school is no one is really watching their children. I hate to stereotype but boarding school girls are worse than Catholic schoolgirls. Their parents are usually further away and people that are in charge of boarding schools are more concerned about academia than the students personal life.
Susan Minot depicts perfectly what it is like to have too much money and too much time. The narrator is having sex everywhere and anywhere she can Minot is depicting the radical, impulsive, and random actions of a teenager. I started to believe that the narrator has the mind of a man; perhaps she yearns for the chase. She searches for boys who are more than willing to be a quickie and she uses them for a good time. When she gets what she wants its to late and the emotional damage has already been done. Our narrator reverts back to her female