Coming Back to Life in the story The River Styx Runs Upstream Essay

Its a universally know truth that death is certain and pot enkindlenot live forever. In the story The River Styx Runs Upstream, the author Dan Simmons predicts and interprets the way our lives would be different if that fact was altered. Simmonss story describes the way the society and people would function if people were brought back from the groundless. The title of the story is ironic since rivers run downstream and not upstream and its also not coincidental that the river Styx is a river which according to classic mythology separates our world from the underworld. The story is narrated by a young boy whose mother dies and is brought back to life. Looking at the events in his life and examining his attitude and others towards resurrected people the intellectual of the dead is acknowledged. There are many beneficial and detrimental effects of bringing people back to life, but the people who bring back the dead ones fail to recognize the unpleasant effects their actions will ha ve on their family.The narrator of the story, one of the younger brothers is satisfied with the fact that his mother is living again and is brought back to life. However what he fails to realize because he is so young that his mother and his family will neer be the same again. His mother will never be the same mother the boy remembers before she was dead. When they first bring her in, she is not what they boy remembers, ...her face was flushed and healthy, almost sunburned. Her skin wasnt cold. It was just different. The resurrected can never fully recover and must be under constant supervision. The father was told that would happen, he was told to think of it as a stroke, but he failed to realize that the stoke isnt temporary and it wont be nurse back ... ...ir peers, no one will speak to them in initiate and the kids make fun of them. The two boys are then forced to transfer to private schools where no one makes fun of them, but kids still dont make the effort to befriend them . The boys are shunned from their social circle and are forced to just play to rangeher all the time. Both the boys have get at falling asleep, and the older boy, Simon, always has the same reoccurring nightmare about his mother grinning at him, not smiling, but grinning real wide... her teeth... filed down to points. It get so emotionally frustrating for the boys to be around her that Simon convinces the younger brother to run away with him so they no longer have to be in her presence. After the father learns that the boys tried to run away her tries to take a family vacation where Simon, who is so distraught by the resurrection commits suicide.