Analyse af Miguel Syjucos novelle 'Be Here Now'

Life is short, and the most of us want the best out of our lives. We walk around with high expectations for our lives – we humans want the perfect life, with the perfect friends, with the perfect surroundings – constantly seeking for perfection, so people may portray us as perfect.

Sometimes reality can hit us hard and very badly when our expectations don’t fit reality, we can become very vulnerable. Our mental state can become very unstable and life can seem to be trash and pointless.

Social media is an essential element in how humans compare themselves with each other, and we can be some tough judges to both others, and especially ourselves – constantly seeking for the perfect life.

Some extreme events can change the way of seeing and living life, it can be both negative or positive.

The short story “Be Here Now” from 2012 by Miguel Syjuco, portrays a man’s fate and his terrible war thoughts, and his fiancée Jenna and their relationship. The short story starts in media res, we are thrown directly into the lives of the characters, without knowing the situation. The main character is an obvious first-person narrator, and we don’t know his name. Instead of focusing on characteristic features, which there aren’t many of, we are therefore focused on his feelings and thoughts, which there’s many of.