Compare the Ways in Which Poets Represent Obsessive Behaviour in 'eat Me' and 'the Gun

‘Compare the ways in which poets represent obsessive behaviour in ‘Eat Me’ and ‘The Gun’.’

In both ‘Eat me’ and ‘The Gun’ the poets highlight the idea of obsessive behaviour through the narrators’ greed for power and control. In ‘Eat Me’ the focus of the obsession is with food and her getting bigger, whereas in ‘The Gun’ the obsession is mainly focused on the obsession of using boundaries which could in turn, be what keeps the house alive. The two poems show us the negative effects of obsession and how our greed for power often ends in darkness.

In the poem ‘Eat Me’ Agbabi emphasises the negative impacts of the man’s obsession with controlling the woman’s life., “I rolled and he drowned” this shows the negative impacts of having an obsession as he was so obsessed with controlling the woman’s life that he didn't realise that he was giving her the power to fight back which resulted in darkness and catastrophe -him being killed. As well as this the constant use of assonance, alliteration and repetition highlights the man’s obsession further as it allows the narrator to convey at the fact that there is no indication of any intimacy between the narrator and her partner. She is just his obsession.

On the other hand, in ‘The Gun’ Feaver highlights to us that peoples lives get taken over by their obsession and that there is lack of room for anything else, “Soon the fridge fills with creatures that have run and flown” This emphasises the severity of the couple’s obsession with killing animals as once they started killing they can't stop. Their lives are so largely consumed by their greed for power and control that they are unable to stop as they fear that their house will no longer be ‘alive’.

As well as this, Feaver suggests that the couple could be obsessed with not only the power the gun gives them but the darkness that the gun casts upon nature. They receive joy out of the death of the animals, “the cooking: jointing and slicing” suggests that they are surviving from the animals as they are their food source. It is not only the man's obsession but the woman's too, she is obsessed with how the gun brings them closer together. If they stop hunting they will not only lose the power that the gun gives them but their source of food and their closeness as well. The use of colons, such as “the cooking: jointing” in the final stanza, acts as a strong caesura and ‘jars’ the poems flow and rhythm, which could be interpreted as showing the impact that their obsession has on life, as well as the unnatural impact that guns and killing has on the world. Alternatively, it could been seen as though the narrator is apprehensive of her husband’s obsession and that she is not convinced about the specific ideas and scenes they are describing.

Overall, both