Hairball Essay -- essays papers

HairballA 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 dark and certainly unusual, but such is the life of Kat, the main character in Margaret Atwoods short story, Hairball. Kats 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 lowering exterior, but as Kats life begins to disintegrate we discover that the strong exterior is just a facade devised to protect a light-colored and fragile interior. Kats facade begins to unravel and she undergoes significant personal losses in fact, the losses go so far as to take her identity 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 baseball club 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 healthful as her name.From the beginning of Kats 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, 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 Kats personality disintegration. She has gone from Katherine, to Kath, to Kat to being temporarily without a name.The journey that Kat takes through the story, from a person be by o thers 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 blue 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 rag onto which she hopes to paint her final masterpiece.