Rental Heart Analysis

Assignment A: The Rental Heart

The Rental Heart is a short story about love in a robotic world, written by Kirsty Logan. The story is told in first person perspective, from our main character. Grace is the most important character, and the person the main character is buying his heart for. The main themes of the story are love and trying to choose love.

The story starts with our main character on his way to rent a heart, the story then revolves around him reminiscing about past hearts and persons he have loved, and having his heart literally broken. The story ends with the reader finding out he does not love Grace anymore, and maybe never have.

The story is set in a world like ours but more steampunk or cyborg like. The characters both have human and robot characteristics, such as eating ‘’I swallowed the rest of my lunch’’ and having metal hearts who can be attached and unattached, without the greatest trouble.

The main character has had his heart broken several times by both boys and girls ‘’Jacob’’, ‘’Anna’’ which indicates that the main character is either a robot without sexes or bisexual. When the protagonist gets his heart broken, it literally breaks ‘’ When Jacob left, I felt my heart shatter like a shotgun pellet, shards lodging in my guts’’, this is also interesting because it in this case makes a symbolic act real.

This story is a science fiction love story. The people in this story are all humanoid, but all has a robotic heart and chest. It is not a typical science fiction, because of the fact that there are no aliens, space adventure, or even futuristic elements. The steampunk inspired cyborg people are science fiction enough for it being a science fiction story.

The Rental Heart uses many symbols, the most obvious one as the broken hearts, which means getting really hurt or left, by someone you truly love.

The shards the hearts are made of are used as feelings, ‘’But the parts of me that I wanted to give to Anna were long gone, down the gutters of the city, mixed with the chemicals of forgetting. Those shards had dissolved, washed away forever’’ here we see how the shards of his heart are long gone, and cannot be found again, so the hearts is in this story are used as where you are feeling things and where love exist. This is interesting because it takes modern sayings and symbolic pictures of the heart being a symbol of love, ‘’she broke my heart’’, ‘’I love her with all my heart’’ and ‘’I gave you my heart’’, and transforms it into it being not metaphoric but real. Love is also made physical in the story, ‘’the more I loved him the heavier my heart felt’’ here we hear how love is heavy and physically something you can feel. ‘’My empty chest made it easy to breathe’’, here we again here how everything is better and easier without love.