Jerry And Molly And Sam By Raymond Carver: Unhappiness And Coping With Problems

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Each of us individuals have been to a point in their life where stress has taken you over by the overwhelming workload or life itself. In one of the short stories of Adaptations there is a particular story that is dominantly eye catching. “Jerry and Molly and Sam” is a story that introduces a troubled life named Al.

Al has a job but is afraid of losing it; he also developed a drinking problem along with his infidelity. He owns a dog which majority of problems can occur when owning a dog does happen; he thinks it is the root of all of his problems so he tried to get rid of it.

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Al then, abandons the dog only made problems much more worse for Al. He then realises that he cannot keep control of his problems, because of the habits he has created for himself. In this case Al is knowingly and willingly to slowly give up in life. In the short story the author then quotes “open the door, push her out, drive away,” figuratively not literally, but that is what Al does to his problems in Raymond Carver’s short story.

Mental health is one of the major factors to take care of because, essentially, it is the functionality that keeps the body and decision making complete. As Sara Mackenzie et al. Describes Mental Health and Stress: your reaction to these events are called the stress response. . . stressors disrupt the body’s balance and require adjustments to return systems to normal.

Al is at risk of losing his job, his wife, he already lost his dog which is now all leading to put pressure on him and beginning to stress him out. Al Is doing this to himself and the only one that can change as a person is himself. He let the built in stress get the best in him and so the outcome of the situation became a rock bottom moment in his life for Al. “If your number was up, that was that- and there was nothing anybody could do”.

Al’s days with his job were limited, in his eyes, and there was nothing he could do to stop it from crumbling down. According to Julian Barling in “Handbook Of Work Stress,” which states that “an extensive on the issue of harassment at work, both in general and to some extent from a stress perspective. Which means Al may experience discrimination In his work area, or perhaps the way they treated Al because of how he carried himself through day to day basis. Al is the only one that can work, providing for his family to make the money that is needed. Instead he does the opposite and puts a strain on his life including his wife and kids.

Furthermore, this can ultimately cause family conflicts because Al Is not aware of what he is jeopardizing. Al is being selfish to himself and family. From observing Al through the lens of a book, his upbringing is a dysfunctional norm which leads to this kind of behavior. Al became more self centered as his bad habits grew within him. The blaming instead of the owning. Pointing fingers at someone else simply because Al can not own up to his own responsibilities. How the writer Raymond Carver mentioned about Al “He had to start someplace – setting things in order. And he intended to start control of his life.” As Al saw It, his way to change something in his life for the better, than how his life before would have ended up. Al came to realize that it is never to late change his own ways that he has created for himself and his family. Thus, being the fact that he seen how much damage he has done to his friends and family. In Al’s mind, taken the dog out of the picture was the obvious place to start.

In the story Al had channeled all his unhappiness and inability to cope with his own problems on the dog and he thinks that getting rid of the dog would somehow bring some relive to his many problems.