Secretary

This type of literature was a little bit of a shock to my system. I could not believe what I was reading, and it kind of repulsed me in a way. There was a very realistic feeling to the story, and I could see this happening in the real world. Gaitskill finds a way to make the story believable on most levels. Taking a look at Debby's family life you could see that they were pretty dysfunctional and there was a sense of abuse there. It makes me think that all of the years of verbal abuse from her father just festered inside of her. After a long period of time I think she started to think that it was normal to just take what was given to her and like it. This leads me to think that she liked what she got from the Lawyer because she deep down likes abuse. After all that happened with the Lawyer, it might have flipped a switch in her head that she does not have to take abuse from anyone, anymore. It would be interesting to see what type of person she ends up turning into after this experience.

Programmed

It starts with music then moves onto TV and who knows what else. We are being programmed by big corporations to do what they wants us to do, and there is nothing we can do about it. The future does not look so bright because before you know it there will be no differences between one person to the next. We are given no choices to make on our own anymore, and we are all driven to think that we can not live without what these corporations are selling. It is a scary feeling to think that we might one day live in a world that is completely uniform and has no character. Before you know it we will all be robots that can't think for ourselves anymore. Who knows we might already be at that stage, we might be living in the matrix as we speak and there is nothing we can do about it. We might be just be walking around with no purpose listening and doing what everyone else tells us to do.