Alexandra M.

Guadalupe
Instructor Nelson O. Nazario
INGL-3104-020
17 April 2016
Up and Down
That is how Amys thoughts were running while she was planning out her
disappearance, which the climax of the story, up and down, good and bad, calm and wild. This
free verse poem is specifically describing Amy Dunnes thoughts in every sense during that time
she made a plan to disappear, those thoughts before her disappearing from everyones lives.
We all know that she did it because she wanted to be noticed, she wanted to show everyone that
she was important and that she was faking everything in her life in order to make everyone else
happy. But thats the situation, everyone was happy or pleased, except for herself. That is why
this poem seems to show contradictions as a main point, because it is something that is part of us
as human beings. Amy got herself caught in a situation that made her chose between two
decisions that were contradictory. She needed to make a decision in order to do something to
please herself or to keep pleased everyone, to keep faking her true self. The only thing that she
wanted was to be herself just for once. She wanted her husband to love the real her, not who she
was faking to be. That was her idea of freedom. And so she did, she freed herself. She
disappeared, did everything she wanted to do, without restrictions, without being judged. But this
implicated to make some sacrifices as everything in life does. Although, to describe that someone
needs to disappear in order to feel important or to be whom truly that person is, it is a huge
sacrifice to make. With chaos comes change, and with destruction, happiness comes. Amy

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needed to know about pain so she could know the price of freedom and happiness. I think her life
was full of contradictions and that it was an imperfect one.
I chose this structure of the story to fill it (her thoughts before her disappearance) because I think
that people, in the first place or without analyzing the story, may think badly, in a wrong way,
about Amy. This character was created to feel and to think as a human being just like you and
me, and the climax of the story didnt occurred just because she was crazy. Amy Dunne was
not crazy, she made these decisions just because her life obligated her to make them, just because
she needed to disappear so she could see that people truly cared about herself, but just because
she was Amy Dunne, not Amazing Amy. And it was the beginning of all of this conflict, the
existence of Amazing Amy. People thought that Amy was amazing just as her parent described
her in the books and this affected her in a negative way. This had a huge impact in her life so that
it made her wanted to disappear, and as we all know, she did it.
Without going through bad time, we cant live life at the fullest because we all have got to learn
to defend ourselves, and the thing is that most of the time, we learn this out of pain. Amy knew
and thought all she was going to pass through as a consequence of her decisions. What I love
about this character is that although she knew she was going to suffer, she got what she wanted. I
love this character because it is a strong one and I like the way the story does not follow ignorant
stereotypes about how women are supposed to react. For example in most of the stories, they
describe women as delicate human beings Delicate as a flower. Amy Dunne breaks this line
of perspective on how society sees women in every sense, and with this poem I wanted to show
that her life wasnt a perfect one, that she is a human that feels like everyone else, that she did
not made decisions to hurt other, she wasnt crazy and withal of this, she did made what she
proposed to her own self.