Remembering Sarah

Would you be embarrassed if you were in love with an ugly person, and were very attractive yourself? In the world today, appearance is of most importance and if you love an ugly person when you are beautiful, you are seen as dating below yourself. In the case of Paradise: by Toni Morrison, Ron is telling the story both in first and third limited person. The reason for this style of narrative is precisely because Ron is embarrassed both that he loved a homely unattractive woman, and of the way he has treated her.

At the beginning of the story, Ron starts off in first person, introducing himself by saying, “I am the man and my friend Sarah Cole is the woman.” This proves to us right at the start that Ron indeed is the man that is in the narrative. Ron is ashamed of himself and therefore has to wait until he knows that Sarah is dead to get his story out of his system by telling it in this way. Banks uses first person and third person limited points of view to illustrate that Ron is apprehensive about telling the story as himself, so he tells it as if it is another character. But he then flips it back by telling the readers that he is indeed Ron, for example, “I said earlier that I am the man in this story.” He does this because he is embarrassed about the way he treated Sarah.

Banks chooses to tell the story in a limited point of view so we as the readers can really never know exactly what is going through Sarah’s head at this time. I know that if I was seeing a gorgeous rich man I would be ecstatic, but we really are not able to see what she feels about the situation, or how she feels when Ron rejects her. I sympathize with Ron, because he has in a sense lost someone that he dearly cared for; but I especially can relate with Sarah because rejection is really hard to deal with. However, Ron is going through a social problem, and as I mentioned at the beginning society is big on appearance and attractiveness, so he is afraid to take Sarah into public. I understand his point, but however I felt that if he really loved her he should not have been afraid of what others thought. Only until she was dead could he admit that he loved her, and even then people did not believe him.

Ron starts the narrative off as a love story, building up to that first time they made love, but he ends it as a tragic story of the loss of a woman that he truly cared for. Banks starts the narrative off at when they met, and then skips to the times that they just happen to bump into each other. Finally he tells about them making love and talking for hours, and Ron even goes out into public with her. However, he ends the story as if he himself has killed her with