APLC-P1 Girl, Interrupted Literary Analytical Essay Girl, Misinterpreted. Self-actualization is our motive to reach our full potential.

. As individuals, we set goals to serve as our motivational platforms; everyday, we create ways to improve ourselves, whether by improving our intellectual capacity through lessons in school or through our social interactions. We are labeled in society according to how we project ourselves; our labels serve as frontiers, a classifier that divides us into common groups which determines our acceptance or rejection by the community. To be accepted, we seem obliged to follow expectations whether by our personal expectations or of those around us. If neglected, we seem to fall into the opposite category and that is, being isolated from the whole and labeled as outcasts. With the use of metaphor, abstract imagery, juxtaposition and official documentation of her own diagnosis, Author Susanna Kaysen, the daughter of two profound individuals from Massachusetts who is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at the tender age of eighteen, meditatively illustrates in her novel, Girl, Interrupted, as she recounts the turbulence of her lifetime of being admitted in a mental asylum, the bleakness of mental disorders that is concealed by classifications and clinical diagnosis, the disarray of expectations parallel to her own reality and the sympathy towards the mental outcasts of society. Kaysen opens her novel in an indifferent tone, almost apathetic of her current circumstance as she sits in a doctors office, unaware of the event that would alter her life for the next eighteen months and possibly, her future. With the use of metaphors, she vividly focuses on a pimple that abstractly conveys her id for self-loathing; her

urge to release the hard expectancy that is begging to be released. Throughout the novel, she establishes her mood with the use of abstract imagery. Kaysen illustrates mental illness and the institution as a parallel universe that gravitates her, along with other patients of McLean Hospital and their isolation to the outside world due to their outcast nature and what is not considered to be normal by the society. As the memoir unravels itself, the author expands her aptitude as she provides clinical documentation that juxtapose with her personal recollection. In a wretched tone, she gives an in depth analysis of every action and event associated with her own mental diagnosis and how it is categorized in a nonchalant matter by the nurses and doctors as cases. The clinical documentation provided by the McLean doctors collates with her personal accounts, which excels the memoirs purpose of expressing the bleakness of mental disorders. She expands her strenuous and melancholic speculation by scrutinizing her innermost experience with the disorder alongside her physician reports, vividly giving her audience an unbiased perspective. Deeper into the novel, Kaysen lucidly conveys that she is far more fortunate than those whom she have encounter with at McLeans, who some could not free themselves from the illness. One example is her co-patients, Polly Clark and Daisy Randone who are both in irreversible circumstances. Kaysen describes Polly Clark as a schizophrenic who deserves the most respect in their group for having the sheer gut to attempt suicide by burning herself with gasoline and Daisy Randone as an obsessive-compulsive patient who successfully commits suicide on her birthday. Kaysen then had an epiphany after Daisy died that while some of the patients including her may be released from the hospital, there are others who are forever trapped in a scarred body like Polly or forever silenced like Daisy.

Moreover, Kaysen gives a vignette image of her daily life in McLeans and how it serves as a sanctuary for her against the inhibitions of the world. She describes McLeans as a stark building with a contrasting personality that serves as both a haven and prison. They yearned from freedom at the same time they yearned to have an excuse to run away from their obstructions and the expectations of the world. This conveys Kaysens message that the publics expectations are determined by the kind of capacity people portray of themselves, whether they are capable of pursuing or rejecting of what is expected from them. Furthermore, Susanna Kaysens transition from being an ordinary girl of two achieving parents to a psychiatric patient in an institution to, tentatively, a recovered writer is both poignant and genuine. This book enlightens people whose outlook towards psychotics are too vague and gives a deeper perspective of the enigmatic nature of psychiatric illness.