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Marine Life

The stories in Linda Svendsen's Marine Life are stories of a particular family, as told by the narrator, Adele, the youngest child in a family of half-brother and -sisters. The first story in the book begins as all the children have begun, with the mother, and the story links the first child with the last, Ray with June. The two are fourteen years apart, and the way they relate has much to say about the family unit, about the relationship of each member of the family to the brother and how that relationship has affected the course of their own lives, and will lead to the other stories in the book, stories of different relationships within the family, always from the standpoint of Adele and her responses to 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 memory of when she slept beside him. While it is not clearly stated in this story, the mother has been married more than once. Adele and Ray at least have different fathers, and none of the fathers have lasted. The girl thus seeks a father figure and finds it in her older brother, the clear choice given his much greater age and his somewhat irresponsible but fatherly attitudes toward the girl, as seen in the sequence on the beach as he propels her from one place ...

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Marine Life. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:12, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1684256.html