This is a harrowing story Life - Size, told in the first person narrative, of an obsession with food and body image. "One day I will be thin enough" says Josie, the 25 year old anorectic women who has been hospitalised for the life-threaten self starvation. "Just the bones the pure clear shape of me. " One day I will be pure consciousness" The narration spins out in painful detail the pattern of compulsive behaviour which pervades Josie's existence. Her pitifully barren emotional life is revealed as well.
How did it all begin? Flashbacks of significant events invade Josie's attempts to stop thinking. A shy aqward adolescent, overly sensitive to casual comments about excess flesh, decides to diet. Josie stumbles non - communicatively through a teen - age sexual intention to a later affair with her married professor, retreating ever further from her bewildered family.
But why do events take such an extreme turn? The mystery of anorexia nervosa remains. In the hospital, a nurse who has seen everything seems to strike some responsive cord, and Josie begins eating to gain weight. At the end of the novel she"ll soon be released, under supervision, but the outcome is in doubt. " Can I learn to be so present? Can I learn to be so full? . If I were a body, what would I be?.
In this essay I am going to show how the style of the novel conveys the preoccupations of the main character - Josie.
Josie is an institution she is monitored twenty four hours a day. She cringes when it comes to breakfast, lunch and dinner. Josie clearly has an obsession with food and this can be seen in the very first chapter of the book:.
"That I turn my head and encounter, at eye level, a brown, oily, pimply thing (chicken! As if I would ever eat that) oozing onto amount of mashed potatoes and some big green branches of broccoli. I try and fail to imagine eating it, like munching on a tree. Everything is heaped crowded on a plate, everything touching".
