“I took them [letters] into the garden and burned them one by one and I thought how easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it” (17)
The paradoxical language in this text brings to light an important dichotomy between love and loss. Describing one action as both easy and difficult gives a great deal of insight into the narrator’s battling conscious. They want to lighten the burden of an emotional load by employing a physical technique. In a literal way, this passage simply expresses that the narrator took their letters back from an ex-lover and burned them to forget about lost love. After looking at how the contrasting diction seamlessly slides into a symmetrically structured phrase, it becomes clear that there is a much deeper meaning. This passage’s play on words suggests that no matter how simple a solution may seem there is always more depth. After destroying the past, the narrator needs to reach the cynical truth that material objects do not embody the worth of what they carry. Letters cannot own love, so the process of destroying love’s messenger becomes fruitless. The narrator knows this truth, but burns the objects anyway as a moment of cathartic hope that is soon to be realized as inadequate.
This passage tells us that the narrator is cynical and slightly pessimistic but greatly intuitive. It tells us that he or she is realist who is humanized by the mistakes that a great deal of people make after losing love. Burning letters of lost passion is not a foreign concept to many who have experienced heartbreak, if anything the destruction of once prized goods is expected. For the rest of the novel, this behavior implies that the narrator may continue to make relatable mistakes throughout her journey. It sometimes seems to be the most introspective, analytical people in life that get hurt the most. I wonder if the narrator will continue on her trajectory of analytical heartbreak.