by Lorrie Moore
While Zoe is the focus of the story and may seem at first to
be a sympathetic character, I view her as an antihero. She is not portrayed as smart, funny, or incredibly
intelligent, though she is very sarcastic.
I think her eccentricities do help to characterize her as a person, but
they do not make her more sympathetic. "This was what she'd become: a woman alone at the movies with everything in a Baggie" (Moore, 363). They reveal her as someone who wants to be in control and have things in
order. Being lonely is not fun, nor is
it a conscious choice for Zoe, and though being set up could help that, it goes
against Zoe’s personality. She was
previously rejected and hurt and not everything was in her control. Though not initially apparent, she developed
hostility not towards herself for her mistakes, but towards men. This leads to the situational irony at the
end of the story.
Situational irony is present because the reader would expect
Zoe to be open to a man and a date because she has been lonely, but what really
happens is that she becomes aggressive and displays outright hostility: "Zoe came up, slow, from behind and gave him a shove. His arms slipped forward, off the railing, out over the street" (Moore, 370).
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