Looking at Myself

  As the end of the novel neared, the tension built higher and higher in the reader. I appreciate how the book ended especially in its last scenes between the narrator and Liza. My title, "Looking at Myself", plays significance in what I find is the most clever aspect of the book. I believe that Liza is the part of the narrator that is suppressed. Liza is in the form of a woman due to the fact that the narrator, like his fellow peers, hides all 'feminine' aspects of his personality due to the social construction of gender roles that has a direct relationship with society. When confronted by the part of his conscious that he has hidden for all these years, the narrator undergoes a breakdown. His vulnerability and flaws are exposed as a result of Liza’s presence. Liza is fighting to breakthrough to the narrator so he does not conform to the social pressures that he hates, and in the end, it seems a hopeless cause.
     The scene where Liza disappears into thin air suggests that that part of his consciousness is dead. Now, the narrator has fallen to the horrid deeds of society and there is no sense of hope for Liza (the narrator) to ever come back home. From this I hypothesized that man is so entangled in the defined boundaries that he has set for himself, that, like the narrator, he we as a civilization will all be alone and miserable for the rest of our lives because all forms of expression of self are exterminated.