Quid Pro Pain in "The Surrendered" by: Abby Booher

Lee’s book, “The Surrendered”, is filled to the brim with pain on every page. Each chapter examines a new life-story including some horrific scene of emotional or physical pain – and sometimes both intertwined. The pain in these pages further tell the story of each character (their feelings and methods of coping with life) and how they relate to their horrid pasts.

One particular passage is when Sylvie is shaving her legs (p. 229) and begins to cut herself, “It looked as if a wave of blood had washed over her leg but it was merely a surface current, and she was never in the remotest danger; the sight froze her, however, and although she heard the doorbell (her aunt was out of town) she didn’t stir, seeing only the bodies of Reverend Lum and his wife lying uncovered in the courtyard of the mission, a splotch of dark red that had spread over Mrs. Lum’s face the lone mark on the ground, light snow descending upon them.” In this passage, Sylvie cuts herself by accident at first then “instead of stepping out and blotting the wound with a tissue she propped her foot against the tiled wall and let it bled, accelerating the flow with another quick gash, letting the blood stream past her knee to her thigh, the streaked pale limb fallen asleep and coldly tingling but still existing outside her sensation.” When she cuts herself again, the pain of cutting sends her mind back to the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Lum. Her blood mirrors their blood in the water.

But why would she cut herself in the first place? By following the order of events and where her mind takes her, it is easy to notice that the first pain she experiences is some distant pain of her past. The beginning of the paragraph even states that “the past engulfed her all at once”. Her mind was in turmoil of her life story. To remove that pain, Sylvie simply replaces it with another one – cutting. By cutting herself, she receives a quick stimulating pain which then turns to a “limb fallen asleep and coldly tingling”. While this relieves her pain for a few moments, the blood in the tub quickly send her back to the memory of Mr. and Mrs. Lum. She is in a never-ending cycle of pain, and she simply replaces one for another only to feel relief for a short time.

But she doesn’t end there. Her final method of ending the terrible memories from the blood is through sex, “[she] undid his belt and put him in her mouth... then that blood came from her once more.” Once again, the painful story of her past is blotted out with another form of pain. Sylvie’s story is an unending cycle of movement from one pain to the next each new one trying to suppress the older ones.