Tuesday, January 22, 2013

In the Name of Love

The Pact by Jodi Picoult is about a suicide pact, or what seems to be one at first. Emily and Chris have been friends since birth, and neither of them have childhood memories that don't involve the other. Emily suffers sexual abuse as a child, and it haunts her so that even when her and Chris's relationship turns into one of lovers, she can't feel comfortably intimate with him. Emily has a lot of pressure to go far in life, and when she gets pregnant, she decides she can't handle it, and decides to kill herself. She tells Chris of this plan, and he decides to try to stop her. As the plan develops, Chris keeps waiting to stop her, and finally, they end up with the gun to Emily's head and Chris not being able to stop it anymore. Chris shoots Emily, the person he loves most in the world, and suddenly she's gone, and it's his fault. 

So why didn't Chris stop Emily? Instead of trying to get help, as you're supposed to do for a friend who informs you of a suicide plan, Chris aides in the ending of Emily's life. The reason that Chris did this is very complex. For part of the time while Emily was planning her own death, Chris could have been in denial. 
Even though he knew that his girlfriend was suicidal, he could have not realized the full extent of the problem, or not wanted to accept it. 

My theory, and the one that seems most plausible due to the characters' relationship is that by helping Emily kill herself, Chris actually thought he was helping her. He was setting her free from a life she hated living, and he didn't want to betray her trust by telling someone of her wishes. Chris did what he thought was best for Emily, just as he had done his whole life. 

People often make mistakes, think that they can solve problems that are in reality too big for them to handle. Most of the time, this ends up in a bad situation, but in Chris's case, it ended up in the death of the person he loved most. 

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3 comments:

  1. UnknownJanuary 22, 2013 at 7:58 PM

    Thought provoking post, Sophie!
    This is an extreme situation, but I think we can relate it to many other more common ones in peoples' lives. When presented with an issue, people often live in denial and try to act as if it's not there until it's too late, and then they give in to it. For Chris, the result is much more extreme, and it pains me to think of the emotional journey he must've traveled that resulted in him helping his best friend and lover kill herself.
    Nice post ;)

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  2. CarmenSHJanuary 23, 2013 at 5:34 AM

    So interesting, Soph! People often think that they can solve or are the solution to problems much bigger than them, but if no one person did start to make a solution for a big problem then it won't lead to many other people following them and actually maybe solving that problem. So even if you are only making a small impact on a big issue, you will still be leading others to do so too and man y small impacts make a big impact.

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  3. David MoralesJanuary 29, 2013 at 3:06 PM

    this was an interesting post. i think that Chris thought he was doing her a favor by helping her do what she wanted to do even though it wasn't the best thing to do. sometimes people in the real world have good intentions but its always isn't the best thing to do.

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