Can you ever forgive???

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Have you ever experience anything or anyone that could have terrified you in your life? Especially those around you and had close relationship with you, for example, your love one?

If that happen, can you ever forgive the person? I know it must be very difficult for one to decide, also it need to depend on what situation is it?

In Rebecca Brown stories, she often makes her readers feel terrified. Her works is very brutal that it covers with a kind of dark beauty and perhaps a sense of humor also. Here I want to introduce you to this story “Forgiveness”.

In her story “Forgiveness”, Brown has speaking of the terrible relationship between couples. I don’t know if this is a relationship between a man and a woman, or a woman and a woman, but it is a very horrible story after all. The narrator in the story has to paid very much for what she has said, just to shows that she is very care for her partner and will give everything she has to her partner if in need. Her arm was cutting off just to prove for her words and their relationship, “I had the feeling you didn’t think I would really do it, that you were testing me to see if I would, and I wanted you to know I would” (1432). I think this is very crazy, very horrible. There is so many different way to prove their trust, care and even love in a relationship, I don’t know why the author thought about this idea of cutting off the arm and then feel sad after all this had been done.

 And at the end, the narrator just feels that she has been betray or so that she could not believe in what her partner has told her, “that I would never believe you again, never forget what I know of you, never forget what you’ve done to me, what you will do. I’ll never believe the myth of forgiveness between us”(1436). I don’t understand why the author had described this relationship in a very deep emotion, all of the trust, feeling, care and love but then at the end, it was a disappointment and distrust that the narrator could never forgive it. This is very confusing.

* * * Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar. "The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English". New York, N.Y: Norton & Company, Inc 2007, (1432-1436).