Save as Many as You Ruin

Save as Many as you Ruin.

By: Simon Van Booy

In the story "Save as Many as you Ruin" by Simon Van Booy we meet Gerard. Gerard seems very confused and has many feelings he can't control. Approximately 8 years ago he had a daughter with his wife whom he didn't love. Just six month after his daughter was born his wife left his wife left him to fulfill her ambition of becoming an actress, just four years later she died. So there Gerard is, with a child he had with a woman he didn't love. He has had many relationships but none of them very serious or no serious at all and then all of a sudden on his way home from work he meets Laurel.

In this essay I would like to focus on his emotions and his ability to stay in the past. Every person means something different for him and represents different kinds of feelings which he finds very difficult to control.

Gerard is a man who doesn't quite know how to move forward. One possible explanation could be his daughter Lucy. He had her with a woman who today is deceased. But because of her he, is forced in a way to stay in the past. All the problems he and his wife had and the feelings that weren't there between them seem to be in the back of his head all the time. Even though he didn't love her maybe he liked the life he lived or the social status it gave him to be a nuclear family or at least it seemed that way outside the facade. He had a base and someone who needed him. Then when his wife left him, the base was gone and so was the idea of a nuclear family with mom, dad and children. So that would be a failure to him in the social picture. The feelings that came afterwards seemed like he didn't know how to control them and that might be one of the reasons why he stayed in the past. The break off of that family robbed him the ability to move on so far behind he just drifts through the everyday life with many different women and a child he doesn't know how to be around. Then when he meets Laurel Gerard falls immediately for her and sees her as the way out of his misery. But every time he thinks of Laurel he compares her to Issy, mother of Lucy and the way it used to be. Maybe that is one of the reasons why he moves so quickly in with Laurel. Maybe he thinks if he moved quickly in with her, his thoughts would disappear and as the time goes on Issy would disappear from his mind even though Lucy would be a constant reminder of her for the rest of his life. But when he moves in with Laurel he gets his base back and the picture of a nuclear family starts to exist again in his mind, but also in the society he will fit in again and the feeling of failure will go away. Then there again would be some sort of balance in his emotions.

Gerard is a man with few close people. Gerard's daughter Lucy is his little pumpkin. The first time we hear about Lucy