LOOSE ENDS

Loose Ends presents the responses of the white Americans to immigrants. If we read the story carefully we will see that Marshall who is also called Jeb is an American and he first spends his childhood in Florida, then he moves on to Vietnam, where he fights for America in the Vietnam war then travels to London and from there he moves back to America and now lives in Miami. Bharati Mukherjee in this short story shows a Punjabi man: “the little guy with turban”, Gujarati emigrants, an Indian sadhu and Hispanic Americans and shows Marshall’s disdain for them. He tries to act “cool” and pretends to be a suave killer, killing with ease, someone who has his rules, he does not like to kill children and old people. Through out the short story Marshall indirectly tries to show the “greatness of America” however readers can clearly see that Marshall is a hitman on his own soil. The “great America” with its multiculturalism has allowed immigrants from around the world who are actually leading successful lives. The man in the turban now has a shop in the mall, Chavez whom he disdainfully calls ‘geaser’ whom he killed was successful and so are the Gujarati immigrants he meets at the end of the story.
“Its life in the procurement belt between those lines of tropical latitude , where the world shops for its illicit goods and dumps its surplus parts where it fights its wars…diificult to live anywhere else” when Jeb mentions this the readers can clearly see that he is actually living in a state of limbo. Having gone to Vietnam at such a young age, he only returns to a changed America and creates a “Vietnam –home” in America. When he says why he likes Miami he says” you smell the fecund rot of the jungle in the headlines”. This is an odd case because it challenges the concept of “home”, here he makes home of a place where he had gone to fight and recreates this created home in his real home. Even when he describes the snake in the zoo he never forgets Vietnam. He knows that when he went to fight in the war he lived in a state of squalor and that squalid condition has not changed. He is rootless and drifting much like the Indian sadhu who levitates to the ceiling. He lives with no strings attached.
When he tells the story of Alice in the Wonderland, Alice here becomes a metaphor for America herself initially the twentieth century cry was “America for Americans” but once she went down the hole what happened? According to Jeb it was the moment of sorry transformation because more and more people immigrated to America. His racism is best understood when he addresses the readers quite directly, taking it for granted that they are white, and calls the native Americans “nice people” and calls the new immigrants sharks and pythons. His last act of raping “Alice” is an act of violence toward the immigrants. It is his act of punishing people who are trying to be Americans, who he knows will not give a job to his ex girlfriend Jonda, who unlike them live a better life for they are not just successful but also together unlike Jeb himself who in spite of all his pride for old great America is a drifter, a killer and a lonely character. Here I would like to just add that the repeated use of “Goldilocks” is quite significant: Goldilocks had originally entered the house of the three great bears, slept in all three bed and appropriated one of them much like the immigrants who seems to have spread in every part of America and leads a better life than Marshall.

SHAFIA PARVEEN PG1