During my reading of “The Management of Grief” by Bharati Mukherjee, I was able to connect so deeply within every passage written, and the dialogue between characters. As I read, I tried to imagine myself during the time of our tragic event on 9/11. It was not the exact tragedy that Bharati was describing, but it was the closest way for me to connect into the solid world she was trying to create within her style of writing. The passage that I pulled out for this blog post is the last one that ends the reading on page 985.
As we have learned in Charters’s “The Elements of Fiction” plot is the sequence of events in a story and their relation to one another as they develop and usually resolve a conflict. In the last passage of “The Management of Grief” it’s as if all the events including the bombing, the loss of relatives, the new reports, the identifying of the lost lives, the constant reminders of such a tragic moment had all come to a calm ending. The last passage certainly resolved the inner conflict that this young woman was facing throughout this tragic story, her inner being was being tested and finally she was able to bring it to an end. Bharati writes as “Your time has come”, they said. “Go be brave” , the style in which she writes this small mental and realistic dialogue shows us how the events of the plot led to us the audience understanding the main character in so much depth. We have all dealt with situations we may not have known how to deal with whether it may be a loss of a family member, or friend, and the events that take place before and after the loss takes a toll on one. Bharati allows us the audience to see that there is no rush or time frame for when it is time to move on. It’s the plot of events that allow us to determine how we will go on and how we will continue our lives once we have come to terms with what has occurred. “The Management of Grief” certainly allows us to get into more than just the plot to show Bharati’s great use of literary elements throughout this reading.
