Marine Life

This first story, "Who He Slept By," is a good beginning for the book for a number of reasons. first, it harks back to the beginning of the family, to the time when Ray was born, and then leads up to the contemporary period. The story thus covers most of the time period of the book right at the beginning, and subsequent stories fill in different eras, address different characters, and expand on the themes and ideas first developed in this opening tale. The importance of the brother to Adele in particular is clear in this story, for she views him much as she might a father, with some of the Freudian impulses and underlying tensions that might apply to a father, apparent in the girl's obsession with who sleeps beside and with her brother and her own particular mem

. . .
other weddings and ceremonies, education, and so on. She introduces a number of characters in and around her family, most of them related to Ray. She shows how her outward feelings for her brother have changed, and she juxtaposes her earlier feelings and her later ones in the latter portion of the story when she first shows how she can now accept as a given the fact that Ray is there every night while at the same time feeling torn because she would rather not go with him to the air show, and then refers back to the time when she slept beside him during a thunderstorm, a time when she slept soundly and safely because he was beside her. The character of Ray is as ambiguous as is the response of the sister to him. He is the older and wiser brother, and yet he is also a foolish man who gets himself into one problem after another. He drinks too much and drives recklessly. While he is the father figure and thus the guardian of the younger sister, she goes with him on a trip so she can protect him from his drinking and driving. All of this in the first story creates an enduring image of the family and the dynamics of that family, and this image is then fleshed out, expanded, and somewhat changed in the rest of the stories in the b
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Adele Ray, Ray June, Robert Klingons, Marine Life, slept beside, York Harper, , mother married, marine life, perspective adele, beside ray, stories book, rest stories, sleeps beside, mother story, father figure,
Approximate Word count = 1300
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Marine Life