An Overview About The Disappearance

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Erik Clark

Mrs. Vories

English 101

17 February 2013

"The Disappearance"

The benefits of a relationship can be great, but its resentfulness can be greater. Relationships at times can have its advantages and its disadvantages- it can be a gratifying experience to be able to communicate with your partner on a meticulous level, to share a commitment with someone and to be able to enjoy a person’s friendship throughout a lifetime. On the other hand, it can also be a arduous experience to be constantly in contention with someone, especially if someone knows every little information about you and because of that reason, they can annihilate you. In the short story The Disappearance, the husband is aware that his wife is going to leave and this leaves the readers to question his apparently innocent character.

In the story, you have a husband who has a stable job, a wife and a son who when his wife leaves the family becomes dysfunctional. The story starts to unfold and then the reader’s begin to decrypt the details of the disappearance. The innocent and worried husband is apparently the culprit in his family’s self-destruction. As the story develops it leaves you bread crumbs on what really happened leaving the readers to ponder.

This disappearance can be perceived by many different determinants. However, this story points out that the husband is the victim for the wife’s disappearance and that he is knowledgeable of her scheme. What is interesting is that the story presents the husband as being innocent by him not quarreling with his wife. Divakaruni writes that "they didn’t really have a fight. She wasn’t, thank God, the quarrelsome type, like some of his friends’ wives" (334). The reason why they never quarreled is not due to the husband’s good character, but rather he disregards her.

In continuation, he is also presented as someone that provides financially for his family. Examples of his financial status are the kitchen being remodeled, then they go on a Yosemite Park vacation instead of the option of going to Reno, when his wife disappeared he put a notice in a half-page ad in the paper, plus a $100,000 cash reward. The man is characterized as a "good husband. No one could deny it. He let her have her way, indulged her even" (334). This statement explains the willingness of the husband who is now being shown in desperate need in help to find his wife, who vanished mysteriously. In this act, he is showing his uprightness and innocence.

  Another situation of his violent impulsive behavior is during sex. During sex, he is straight forward to the point of not even acknowledging her refusal in having sex with him. Such as when she says, "Please, not tonight, I don’t feel up to it." This statement obviously states that she didn’t want to have sex with him, when she refuses he turns violent and forces her to bed. "He raised his voice… grabbed her elbow and pulled her to bed, just like he did that last night" (334). His violence escalates them to bed, where he does not stop, until she cries or begs. But, in the story he thinks he is a responsible man and isn’t violent towards his wife because he does not slap her like his friends and their wives. Due to the violence in the relationship, the woman is imprisoned in the relationship, defenseless and with no choice but to struggle and let him do as he pleases.

Furthermore, the husband is struggling psychologically, especially in handling with the stress and trauma. In one instance, "the husband had enjoyed a harsh enjoyment at the thought of his wife’s death, killed by a lover or a complete stranger" (338). Thinking of his absurd possibility gave him a small, but bitter pleasure. Another example of his psychologically fantasy was stated "With a sudden anger that he knew to be irrational, he would imagine her body to be tangled in swaying kelp at the bottom of the ocean where it had been flung bloated eaten by fish" (338). This man is out of his mind and is mentally losing it and is thinking illogically almost wishing his wife was dead because she left him.

The narration presented is in a way of a man who is presented as an innocent man, but is a victim in his wife’s disappearance. With various clues revealing his irrational behavior, when in truth he is fully aware of his actions, insecurity, gender inequality, and the ideas that a man’s role is to provide while the women’s role is to obey and serve. In the story, the husband is aware of his actions, but denies that his actions are in breach with his wife’s rights and freedoms as a human being who is of equal importance.