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Allusions
Key Examples in Girl, Interrupted
Chapter 21: Keepers
Explanation and Analysis—The Nurses:
Throughout the book, Kaysen portrays the nurses who work at McLean as foils opposite her and her fellow patients. Here is one example from Chapter 21:
The student nurses were about nineteen or twenty: our age. They had clean, eager faces and clean, ironed uniforms. Their innocence and incompetence aroused our pity, unlike the incompetence of aides, which aroused our scorn. This was partly because student nurses stayed only a few weeks, whereas aides were incompetent for years at a stretch. Mainly, though, it was because when we looked at the student nurses, we saw alternate versions of ourselves. They were living out lives we might have been living if we hadn't been occupied with being mental patients. They shared apartments and had boyfriends and talked about clothes. We wanted to protect them so that they could go on living these lives. They were our proxies.
Related Themes:
