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Analysis Of Marie-Helene Bertino's Free Ham

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The Road to Revelation
Love. It can make a person lose sight of the reality that sits right in front of them. It can be deceiving. It can be blinding. It can even make you lose yourself. In Marie-Helene Bertino's Free Ham she depicts the life of a girl named Sam whose attachment to her father hinders her from maturing, suppresses her emotions and leads her to have no idea of who she really is. In the beginning of the story, Bertino exhibits Sam's home on fire and continues to show how Sam copes with this loss. The author's constant use of flashbacks shows how much baggage Sam has carried throughout her life which all leads up to her identity redemption, revealing Sam's true conflict in Free Ham.
Sam's constant exposure to violence at home …show more content…

Sam escapes her reality and tricks herself into painting this picture of her father to avoid coping with the actuality that he doesn't truly love her.
Bertino shows how Sam is induced into fantasizing her relationship with her father and clearly fools herself into thinking her father fulfills the role of a man in her life. Throughout the story, Sam constantly talks to her father, after he insults her as if nothing occurred previously. It is obvious that she desperately wants to have a father-daughter relationship at the beginning while her house is on fire she imagines the following "Two of the angels are a man and his daughter who float by in a car with a shiny hood ornament. He is hunched forward in a gentleman's suit, and she is in a cotton candy coat. His hand reaches behind him to say, in one smooth gesture, do not worry. When we get home, our house will not have a fire in it." (Bertino 1). Here it clearly shows the type of relationship Sam wishes to sustain with her father, and by it being a figment of her imagination one can infer how deep inside she's been longing for this to be a reality. Sam's fantasies express her repressed emotions along with her thoughts resulting in her inability to cope with the reality of the monster standing right in front of her. Bertino does this to make the reader sense a bit of what Sam has carried with her throughout her whole life.

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