In High Fidelity, protagonist Rob is
a middle-aged slacker who owns his own record store but has no overarching purpose in
life. He has left his first career choice of DJ to pursue both a safe job and his
current girlfriend, Laura. At the beginning of the book, Laura breaks up with Rob for
another man, leading him to reevaluate his previous
relationships.
All of Rob's previous girlfriends, from
grade-school on, have either left him, or been left by him. He has no satisfactory
answer to the burning question of why, so he visits each of them to
discover their reasons.
Ultimately, Rob discovers three
things: (1) he has a crippling fear of commitment, (2) he was always oblivious to their
needs, and (3) he acted emotionally instead of
rationally.
“Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch,
those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never
feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and
those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.” -- High
Fidelity
As he meets with and
is "absolved," in his mind, by each girlfriend in turn, he cycles through stages of
denial. First he thinks that fate decides all. Then he thinks that he was rebuffed by
frigidity. Then he thinks he won a conquest with no other goal than victory; that he
wasn't good enough for a perfect girl; and finally that an average girl wanted something
more than himself, the average guy.
Each experience gives
him new insight into his part in the breakups. In each case, he cared more for his own
feelings than theirs, and felt himself incapable, at an unconscious level, of making the
sort of honest commitment that he now craves from
Laura.
When Laura's father dies, her uncertain feelings for
Rob become resolved in her mind. She takes the initiative in getting Rob off his
slacker's throne and back into his first real love, a love he abandoned because of his
fear of commitment: disc jockeying at clubs. With her insights, and his new outlook, he
finally decides to make the choice he wouldn't before: commit to Laura not as a missing
piece of himself or a trophy, but as a whole person with desires and feelings, one who
needs his emotional support more than anything else.
No comments:
Post a Comment