Living with Strangers

Everyone wants a good life with good opportunities. Everyone wants to go to the place where there are most possibilities. Someone chooses to leave his hometown. In order to get a better life where there are more job opportunities. It can also be a problem, since one is not, accustomed to living in a big city, with hundreds of thousands of other people. Hundreds of thousands of Stone faces on the streets and the urbanized city, which creates challenges. Siri Hustvedt tells in her essay "Living With Strangers" from 2002, how life in the big city is and how different and she compared to a smaller city.

At the beginning of the essay we hear Siri Hustvedts own tale about how it was for her to move from Minnesota to the big city New York. She learns very quickly the city's law which is, that they should pretend nothing: "This simple law..." In Minnesota her home country all the people are friendly. They even didn't go past a person without saying hello. But then she experience the life in New York. She lives with a lot of strange people and she is in physical contact with them every day but at the same time not a human contact: "... I found myself in intimate contact with people I didn't know, my body pressed so tightly against them, I could smell their hair oils, perfumes, and sweat. In my forms life, such closeness belonged exclusively two boyfriends and family. It didn't take long for me to absorb the unwritten code of survival in this town ...: PRETEND IT ISN'T HAPPENING. "

Since we only hear her personal narrative captures the reader's attention, she. The personal stories that appear in the essay seem genuine and real. And readers can therefore easily identify with her. We see how she wore it for the first time since she moved into the big city. Siri Hustvedt pointed out in this way also the main theme of the essay for big city.

In the beginning of the essay we only hear about her personal tale. It makes the essay more genuine and truly making readers identify with her.

The important law in the big city was to pretend nothing. "Last October, I was on the F Train when I noticed a wild-eyed man entering the car. He boomed out a few verses from Revelation and then, in an equally loud voice, began his sermon, informing us that September 11 had been God's just punishment for our sins. I could feel the cold, stiff resistance to his words among the passengers, but not a single one of us turned up to look at him." Here she underscores her claim about the big city's law. It occurs Siri Hustvedt strange how different the big city's world is.

She does not know whether it is a good thing to pretend nothing is happening. If there is an operation, and no respond, she believes that it can also be dangerous to break into Siri Hustvedt. That the fact of it should be considering a more natural world to live in and where you have a human value. "...With those few words, and at no cost to himself, he gave her what she needed - a feeling of ordinary human solidarity."

It is a non-fictional text, which is based on something real. The text is prose and takes starting