Sunday, October 27, 2019

What are Jig’s wishes?

Although Jig appears to be unaware of her own wishes, she is grappling with a very pivotal decision and reveals, through gestures and words, that she is conflicted. Her constantly asking her American companion whether he wants her to get the abortion could be seen as a way to get response out of him, to test his love or care for her, and perhaps to test whether they really are a team. Her frequent looking at the landscape, while his focus on his drinks at the bar indicate that she, while a "girl," and he a "man," has a wider sense of the possibilities of the future. She also "knows things." As he insists on what he feels is "the best thing to do," she is interested in happiness. Perhaps, as she has seen with other people who have had the procedure, they could be happy afterwards. But she is not sure they would; she can sense something withering with the denial of the life that could be, if they had "everything."
It can be inferred that, contrary to being simply unsure, the girl wants happiness above all. She says, "We can have the whole world," and characteristic of his tone which is rather closed compared to hers, he says, "no, we can't." She only considers the abortion if it would, overall, grant a certain kind of happiness, in which he would treat her the same as before.
While it appears that she is getting convinced, or convincing herself, to go through with the procedure, though, her inner conflict is illustrated in her last defiant gesture: "Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?" and after they are interrupted by the waitress informing them that the train will arrive, the girl seems to have sealed her resolve, putting on a bright smile for the waitress and for the man as well, telling him (though we do not believe her entirely), that she "feel[s] fine."


Jig's wishes are unclear in this story. She constantly asks her male companion what he wants to do in regard to her pregnancy, and she says, "I don't care about me." Later, however, she seems to want her male companion to care about her pregnancy and to want her baby. She asks him whether her pregnancy means anything to him, and she does not seem satisfied with his explanation that an abortion is a "perfectly simple" operation. She then begs him to be quiet, which implies that she is not satisfied with his answers to her questions. She seems to want to believe him to the effect that she can go through with the operation and return to the way things were between them, but she also seems to doubt his facile assurance that this is the case. In the end, she feels conflicted and seems to have more invested in her decision about what to do with her pregnancy than her companion does.

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