In Part Two of Jenny Offill’s novel “Weather,” Offill elaborates on Lizzie’s unraveling mental state in order to show the psychological toll of living in a world filled with uncertainty and looming catastrophe. Essentially depicting what it’s like to live in fear. This section specifically highlights Lizzie’s feelings of isolation as she tackles her fears in regard to her husband, brother, and son.

What makes Offill’s portrayal of Lizzie’s fears so compelling is that her thoughts aren’t just theoretical. Her worries and fears fall into her day-to-day life and affect her relationships, like her relationship with her husband. Ben is supposed to be this calming and understanding part of Lizzie’s life. We can see that he tries to reassure her that things are not as catastrophic as she thinks they are, but Lizzie is against his attempts to calm her down. Because of this, she feels annoyed, alone, and alienated by his positivity. She sees it as him being almost in denial and sees his efforts of comforting her as pretty futile. Lizzie is constantly overthinking everything, so when Ben tries to calm her nerves, she sees it as him not taking things seriously. Lizzie seems to see the worst in every situation, while Ben tries to be more positive.

You can also see how her overthinking affects her relationship with her son, Eli. Because of her mind constantly racing with potential dangers and threats, Lizzie feels this immense pressure to protect her child from the world she sees is going toward disaster. This fear ends up shaping her interactions with Eli, and she begins to feel a much deeper sense of responsibility in regard to his well-being. While thinking all of this though, she is also aware that she can’t just shelter him from the world for the rest of his life. While thinking all of these overbearing thoughts, she also starts to contemplate her job as a mother, and she doubts whether or not she is being a good mom to Eli.

Finally, Lizzie also plays a role in her brother’s life as a caregiver. Henry is newly sober, so Lizzie feels this huge sense of responsibility over him. Lizzie has this immense feeling of exhaustion and burnout, especially with this constant feeling of needing to help everyone around her. She feels alone in all of it and feels as though all the responsibility must land on her shoulders. This could be because of the fact that she is a mother and feels as though a mother’s job is to have the responsibilities land on her shoulders alone.

Overall, we can see that Lizzie’s experience is not just of dread; we can also see that she is very vulnerable and resilient, and it’s the fear of collapse and the hope for survival that is pushing her to do ‘more.’

Offill seems to be almost ‘picking’ at people who overthink and see the world in this way. From the reader’s perspective, we see her thoughts as jumbled and all over the place, but it might just be Lizzie’s thoughts at the moment. Offill might be pointing out the fact that a lot of the time, the smallest things can have our minds going a mile a minute with worry and doubt, and she masterfully illustrates this through Lizzie.

I want to answer the research question, “How do geographical and cultural boundaries shape a person’s identity?” (Ghosh The Hungry Tide)

In Nayar’s article “The Postcolonial Uncanny…”, he looks at how the past of colonialism continues to affect the present, he uses Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide to do this, specifically with the lives of two characters, Fokir and Kanai. Nayar uses this idea of the “uncanny” to explore how the colonial past still haunts the characters in Ghosh’s novel. According to Nayar, uncanny is the feeling of something familiar becoming strange or unsettling to someone. Both Fokir, a fisherman, and Kanai, a heavily educated businessman, are shaped by the history of colonialism in the Sundarbans, but in different ways.

Fokir, who lives in the Sundarbans, is connected to the land in a more personal way. However, this land has been affected by centuries of colonial rule, which changed the natural environment and displaced the people who lived there. Nayar speaks on how the British built embankments, drained swamps, and exploited the land’s resources, leaving lasting scars on the place. For Fokir, the land can be seen as both his home and a reminder of how colonialism took away his people’s traditional ways of life. Especially since his way of living and making money won’t be very reliable in the future. The land that is supposed to sustain him will soon feel alien and dangerous, which is a result of the continuing changes brought about by the colonial past. Fokir’s life shows how colonial history continues to disrupt what should feel familiar and safe, making his connection to the land both comforting and unsettling.

Kanai, on the other hand, is an outsider from Kolkata who comes to the Sundarbans to review his uncle’s journals. His uncle had studied the indigenous people of the region, but Kanai himself is more distant/disconnected from the land and the people there. At first, Kanai tries to see the region through an intellectual and ’sophisticated’ lens, seeing it as a place for research and discovery. However, as he reads his uncle’s journals, and as the novel goes on, Kanai realizes that, while he may have grown up far from these struggles, he is still connected to the effects of colonialism. The unsettling part for Kanai is that, while he thought he understood the history of the region because of how educated he was, he hadn’t fully grasped how personal and painful that history was for the people who still live there. For him, the past is not just something in books but something that affects his sense of identity and his place in the world.

Together, we see how Fokir and Kanai are both affected by colonialism, just in different ways. Fokir’s life is directly shaped by the land and its colonial past, while Kanai’s understanding of that past is disrupted when he confronts its emotional and personal effects. Both of the characters live with the tension between what they’re most familiar with (their home, their history) and the effects of what unsettles them (the effects of colonialism that still shape their lives). This creates an eerie feeling that the past is never fully gone. Through Fokir and Kanai, The Hungry Tide shows how colonialism continues to affect individuals and communities in more ways than one. No matter what route one decides to take regarding one’s life, colonialism will still impact the land it once affected.