Carnal Knowledge
... willing to cooperate in her shenanigans. “I screamed, getting into it” ‘Torturer! Nazi!’ (pg. 144). As the reader we are able to see within Jim’s inner thoughts; here we can see how her ideas challenge Jim’s basis ideas, “wondering if I should invite Alena to my mother’s for a big basted bird stuffed with canned oysters and buttered bread crumbs”. He is a carnivorous creature, and nothing he or Alena participate in change’s that fact for him. “I thought only of the cavern opening inside me and how to fill it. ‘Meat’’ (pg. 153)! Jim appears to have a generally laid back personality. "'It's nothing,' as if dogs routinely pissed on my wardrobe". He has an average job, an average life, and a sort of average way of thinking, "if I was lucky, I'd go out to a singles bar and make the acquaintance of a divorced computer programmer in her mid 30's with three kids and bad breath" (pg. 139). He is not too passionate about anything, as far as we can tell. He just sort of exists in the world prior to meeting Alena. Even Jim’s background up to the point of meeting Alena seems pretty uneventful. “my plans consisted of taking in a solitary late-afternoon movie as a birthday treat, then heading over to my mother’s for dinner and the cake with candles” (pg. 139). I think that it is important for the reader to get a certain painted picture of Jim so that we can understand why he would be so willing to give up everything in his lif...