Family Unit 4

"The Joy of Cooking"
Elaine Magarell

After reading this story, I realized that my sibilings maybe are not all that bad. The narrator says things in The Joy of Cooking that would lead the reader to believe that she truly does not enjoy her sibilings in the slightest. However, I did not think that the tone was very bitter, I even thought that the narrator seemed a little bit enthused when she talked about the her dislikes for her sibilings. When she is talking about her sister, she says: "I have prepared my sister's tongue, scrubbed and skinned it" (Magarell line 1-2). I think that the fact that the narrator wanted to prepare the tongue meant that this was the most annoying aspect of her sister. She wanted to get rid of the tongue because she hated any words that came from her sister's mouth.

On the contrary, the narrator's brother was not very loving. As the narrator talks about preparing the brother's heart, she says, "Although beef heart serves six my brother's hert barely feeds two" (Magarell line 15-16). I feel as though that was the narrator's way of explaining how little the brother loved. The fact that his heart was not big enough to feed the suggested amount of people implies that his heart was little due to a lack of love for others.