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My first impression about this novel was that I liked it a lot! I could tell in class that there were very diverse opinions about this book. When I read the first assignment I got the impression that Una was a very strong personality. She left her life behind because she didn't like the way it was. I would argue that only a very strong person can leave a life behind in such a way and just jump into a whole new life, a whole new identity. 

How would I describe my relationship with the book and the characters? In class I was arguing that a person can find a connection with any story they read. This is how the interpretation of a book happens. I interpreted Ahab's Wife to match my own psyche. I interpreted Una as a character that is very strong and brave, because it's possible that I want to be that way. Or it is also possible that I would like to leave everything behind the way she did. I don't really know how I connect to this novel or Una. I do know that throughout the excerpts we read I found little details that I could connect to my life and my personality. 

There are so many aspects to this book that connects a lot of what we've learned in this course. Choice. Though the effects of choices we make in our daily lives and the consequences of these choices are more apparent to me after this course, this book is a great example of what choices can do. Cannibalism involves choices that strain a human brain beyond what I believe the brain is capable of handling. The book shows the fight between the physical need and the psychological strain. While in a starving state choosing whether to eat a fellow human or not is a decision that characters in this book had to make. This raises the question, do humans have control over their bodies? Or after the absence of nutrition does the physical body take charge over our mind and actions? It is hard to imagine myself in such a situation, but in all honesty, I don't know if I would be strong enough to push away any form of nutrition in a physical state such as starving, even if it was the bloody remnants of a fellow human.