Thursday, November 18, 2010

The Party On Demand Essay


The Party

When the story begins the girl comes upon her supposed friends who have recently received invites to the “most important party of the year” and is speculating about how great it would be if she was invited to the party. She thinks about how much she wants to be popular and how much she idolizes Bridget, the popular girl throwing the party.  A quote from the first page shows how important this party is to the school. “To not be invited meant standing in stagnant water.”    Even when all her friends already have their invitations and she doesn't, she keeps on hoping. Her hope is shown in this quote:  “…that Bridget was still holding an envelope with my name on it”.

    
Towards the middle of the story, the main character converses with her classmate named Meredith about the party. Neither of them had been invited, but they showed very different reactions to this rejection. Meredith’s versatile opinion about the party greatly surprises our main character and left her with a feeling of empowerment: “I wish she’d invited me so I could tell her no. She’s such a brat. And all that phony hugging. What’s that all about anyways?” What Meredith says allows her to realize that the party is irrelevant- that it would not change who she was.   After her conversation with Meredith, she then goes back to her lunch table. Her friends try to console her and the main character begins worrying again, even with Meredith’s inspirational speech fresh in her mind.   Her anxieties and insecurities resurface quickly, “Maybe she didn’t invite me because of my hair. It’s so long and stringy. Maybe it’s my coat. It is pretty ugly compared to some of the other girls’ coats. I should have bought another color.  But what does it really matter? None of my clothes match. I’m way too tall but there isn’t anything I can do about that, and she couldn’t not invite someone to a party because they were too tall, could she?  Maybe I should smile and hug more but I just can’t get into hugging people unless I know them really well. Probably if I’d smiled more, I would have been invited.” As you can see she now resorts back to petty insults to herself trying to come up with a plausible explanation for her “social exile.”

After going on a very bumpy road the main character comes upon a shaky resolution. Though at first she desperately wished to attend the party by the end she decides it’s not worth the stress or the hassle. Unfortunately, she still yearns secretly for popularity, so when she sees Bridget approaching her with an invitation she tries not to get her hopes up. Bridget offers her the invitation making her heart soar until she comes to this realization “I am an afterthought. I am not on the A list. I'm just filling the space so the vans will be full. Take it, you know you want to go.” This makes her brave and the war that was waged in her mind over the small envelope comes to an end. She finally had the courage to come to produce a decision.

Throughout the course of the story, the protagonist went through a great ordeal about a something as trivial as a single party. This helps her reevaluate the concept of being herself. She now realizes that she doesn’t need to be popularity to be happy with herself and that no one can tell her who she is or what she should be, least of all Bridget. This lesson is a hard one to learn, especially for one so young but our main character learns it quickly and lets it override all the stupidity and drama of school.





     How would you feel if you were excluded from a big event all your friends have been invited to?  There’s one girl who will sympathize with you. In the short story “The Party,” there is a party to which the main character (who is the only one who was left out) is not invited to. Through the course of the story the girl, who is first unbelievably saddened by not getting invited, becomes more independent and breaks away from the hierarchy of cliques and traditional roles in a school, coming to terms with herself and her priorities. The girl learns that popularity and the newest things do not really matter in life.