“The Evolution of my Brother” Quotes:
“Don’t forget me.”
“Or forget me.”
“Or forget some of it. Or remember me. Whatever. It’s your life.”
Throughout the whole story, the narrator would get upset with her younger brother for wanting to always hang out with her, but at the end, she doesn’t want him to grow up just like her mother didn’t want her to grow up. As a middle child, I can relate to the story in both ways.
When I was younger, I always wanted to hang out with my older brother, but then I became okay with spending time alone. We are still close, but it’s not like we spend that much time with it just being the two of us. The quotes in the story are similar to that. She wants him to remember all of the moments that they spent together and wants him to still want to talk to her, but then she is okay with him forgetting her, but then she changes her mind again. The thing about having a sibling is that you will want to hang on to them forever, but as you get older, you find out that you can’t. Even though she is the older brother, she now realizes that she can’t control his life anymore. She knows that deep down she wants to still spend some time with him, but she also knows that he might not want to.
The quotations just show the complexities of a sibling relationship. Being an older sibling is hard sometimes and so is being a younger sibling, but this shows that no matter what happens at times, your siblings still want to be a part of your life. Just like earlier in the story when the father questions how they can go from fighting each other to saying that they are best friends, just because your sibling gets on your nerves at one point, doesn’t mean they don’t want to be with you at all. Is this how all relationships work or is that just with sibling relationships?
I completely agree that sibling relationships can be really weird and confusing. I think that other relationship probably can be like this, but it is the most common between siblings. I think as siblings we spend too much time together to be nice all the time, so we turn to almost bullying each other, but deep down we actually do love our siblings a lot, even though it doesn't always appear that way. I really enjoyed how well this story captured the confusing relationship between siblings.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your reflections on "The Evolution of My Brother"! I always wonder how each reader's family dynamics affect their reading of the story. (I'm a younger sibling.) I agree with your point that "the quotations show the complexities of a sibling relationship." In response to your question, I do think that sibling relationships are complex in a way that other relationships (friendships, romantic relationships, other family relationships) aren't. As the story shows, siblings are simultaneously like friends/peers and parents (because of both proximity and distance in age); the closeness of the relationship can create both conflict and a really strong bond (both of which we see in the story). I really like the quotation you chose to discuss, and appreciate the way it speaks to how sibling relationships evolve as one ages (as you discuss in paragraph 2). -Ms. O'Brien
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