Hairball Essay -- essays papers

Hairball A solitary woman sits in conversation with a benign tumour that had just recently been removed from her ovary. As the woman speaks, the inanimate tumour, which she has named Hairball, looks on from its glass encased perch atop the fireplace. The scene is macabre and certainly unusual, but such is the life of Kat, the main character in Margaret Atwood’s short story, Hairball. Kat’s life is filled with the unusual and the shocking, a lifestyle that has been self-imposed. Throughout the years, Kat, an "avant garde" fashion photographer, has altered her image, even her name, to suit the circumstances and the era. Over time Kat has fashioned a seemingly strong and impenetrable exterior, but as Kat’s life begins to disintegrate we discover that the strong exterior is just a facade devised to protect a weak and fragile interior. Kat’s facade begins to unravel and she undergoes significant personal losses; in fact, the losses go so far as to include her ident ity or lack there of. As Kat begins to lose control, her mental and physical disintegration is hastened by three major conflicts: The conflict with the society in which she lives, the conflict with her romantic interests (specifically Ger), and finally the physical conflict she faces with her own body. In the end, these conflicts will threaten to strip Kat of her lifestyle as well as her name. From the beginning of Kat’s life, she was at odds with her environment. When she was a child, she was Katherine, a doll like representation of what her mother wanted her to be. As a teenager she was Kathy, a representation of what she believed others wanted, â€Å"a bouncy, round-faced [girl] with gleaming freshly washed hair and enviable teeth, eager to please and no more int... ...he vehicle for the ultimate bizarre act reflecting Kat's personality disintegration. She has gone from Katherine, to Kath, to Kat to being â€Å"temporarily without a name.† The journey that Kat takes through the story, from a person defined by others to a person without definition, is somewhat of a birth in reverse. In the story the character of Kat is defined by the conflicts she faces and her inability to adequately deal with them. The more Kat attempts to find herself within the parameters of her society, work and relationships, the more she becomes lost. It is the conflicts that bring Kat to a moment of clarity as she is left broken and abandoned. It is in this state that Kat is able to lose her name and begin to reconstruct herself apart from the influences of others. Without a name Kat is now the blank canvass onto which she hopes to paint her final masterpiece.