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The truth is supposed to be honest and pristine but it can also be contextual, delicate, observable and also sometimes tainted. One always tries to tell the truth yet it is habitually distorted by various representations and views …‘The pendulum of ‘truth’ swung, back and forth’… (Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters, Erica Wagner p.11),represents this fact in reference to the private lives of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. By looking at a specific situation, event, or in this case, relationship through a variety of texts and other sources, one can see how the representation of the truth is revealed. This is shown in Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, throughout the poems The Shot, Your Paris and Red. One can also study other representation’s available by looking at additional sources including Sylvia Plaths’ The Bell Jar, Letters Home and her countless journal entries. Numerous literary texts have been written about the relationship between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath but no one person will ever know the entire truth; as between them it was private, delicate and personal.
Many have disputed that the publishing of Birthday Letters (1998), was Ted Hughes attempt at absolving himself from the primary reason for Sylvia Plath’s suicide in 1986. Throughout the various texts, Hughes inscribes’ his depiction of the truth by maintaining the view that he was not solely responsible for Plath’s suicide. He does this by explaining the original source of Plath’s desolation, being the early death of her father Otto. He represents this truth through The Shot, which uses an extended metaphor of a bullet to compare Plath’s demise to that of a bullet, set off by her fathers death.
The Shot, (the 3rd work in the anthology), uses an extended metaphor of a bullet to show the true confusion and diminishing sanity Plath possessed that was originally triggered by the death of her father. Ted Hughes presents the truth that Plath was on a bullet path to self-destruction, and nothing he did, or anyone else for that matter was going to change that.
Approximate Word count = 1681
Approximate Pages = 6.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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