Sunday, October 4, 2009

Review #1, The Fountain House by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

The Fountain House was an eerie story with Gothic elements. An unnamed girl dies in a bus accident, and her father will not accept the fact that she is dead. He therefore goes back to the hospital and pays a doctor (who badly needs the money, and likes a challenge) to try and revive her before the autopsy is performed. He therefore steals his daughter's body from the morgue and brings it to the ICU where the doctor awaits. I do not exactly understand what happens next because the father falls asleep and has a dream where he brings his daughter a sandwich, and in the sandwich there is a human heart. The daughter looks at him as if she does not want to see him. The father then proceeds to eat the sandwich (though his daughter wants to eat it and I can not figure out why) because she will die if she eats it. The father wakes up and the daughter has been revived. The father actually had a blood transfusion while he was sleeping because his daughter needed his blood. What I do not understand is the dream, or what the heart sandwich represents. Obviously a heart represents life, so maybe by eating the sandwich (which represents death) it shows him saving his daughters life by eliminating death. Also the pain the sandwich causes may represent the pain he felt due to the blood leaving his body, but the sacrifice was backed up with love. I also believe in the dream he was visiting his daughter in the after-life and her "I do not want to be bothered" attitude and wish to eat the heart sandwich might represent the fact that she understands her time had come, and the father might be messing with death and fate by trying to revive her, when he should just let her be. After typing that I understand this story a lot better, and it is extremely interesting because there could be many interpretations. 

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1 comment:

  1. So what happened at the end? Did she come back to life? Did he awaken from his dream?

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