Overall reaction to My Brother.

I have not changed my mind, the mind that had thought that the book repeats repeats itself. The book still says things over and over. For effect. For drama. For confusion. For clarification. I realized that beyond this complaint, maybe one thing did change. I felt pity for the brother after reading a passage from the book. "In his life, there had been no flowering, his life was the opposite of that, a flowering, his life was like the bud that sets but, instead of opening into a flower, turns brown and falls off at your feet" (162-163). Pity (not empathy), not because he was stricken with a disease that had left him dying and then dead, but because he had a secret lifestyle that he could not disclose because of his society and his culture. I did not care for him, his womanizing without protection, his thievery, but looking at him from the viewpoint that he is a child who is two years old with the world open to him, and a sister who reads books instead of attending to the hard crap in his pants, I envisioned someone who never knew who he really was or could not express himself fully, stifled, someone who never really loved anyone or was loved by anyone except maybe his mother. This is not really Devon's story, even in the end, because it is still his sister's and yet it is not even hers. At first I thought writing this story was her self-serving way of creating ablution, some kind of resolution to the confusion she feels about her family. Then I realized at the end of the book that she wrote for William Shawn, her perfect reader, and that maybe he was really her brother in the end (196-198). In that way, I thought it clever that the title was just My Brother.