The Inevitable Of “Sea Oak”

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The Inevitable of “Sea Oak” The short Story “Sea Oak”, by George Saunders combines reality with fiction to show the depths in which an individual will go to escape suffering. Through the contrasts of reality and fiction, Saunders’s “Sea Oak” demonstrates that suffering is inevitable because we are indeed human and even with the help of the super natural there is no escape. In Saunders’s “Sea Oak”, reality and fiction are combined to portray real life suffering with a twist. Reality, as most readers understand, are the everyday things that seem to make life a little more difficult; living in ghettoes, high school dropouts, minimum wage jobs, and small rental apartments all contribute to a more difficult life style. “Sea Oak” touches upon all of these, presenting reality in its’ most explicit form. Aunt Bernie (a character of “Sea Oak”) lives her life without many joys, her nieces are high school dropouts with children and they live with her and her nephew, the narrator, who works at a strip club. Aunt Bernie works at a pharmacy, making very little money and lives in a “pit”, according to the narrator. Moreover, Aunt Bernie is unusually nice, that it bothers the narrator. Realistically if a person ran over someone else’s foot, they wouldn’t just walk home and act like it didn’t happen, they would take the appropriate matter to resolve the issue at hand, but not Aunt Bernie. All these details provide a real life situation for the reader. The fictitious aspect of the story is conveyed when Aunt Bernie dies of fear and comes back to life as a bitter woman, trying to make things right for her and her nieces and nephew. Aunt Bernie, after coming back to life, is depicted as a corpse; her flesh is decomposing and limbs begin to fall off of her after a few days. In all, reality in “Sea Oak” is a major part of the story as it reveals the true struggles of all of the

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