Writing the Future: Conflicting Anticipations in “no one’s a Mystery”

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is a choice to which one must become committed and work hard to fulfill. The future should be seen as a “mystery” — one that we are committed to solve successfully. But the narrator is not capable of writing such a future for herself. She will not sacrifice and suffer. She is totally committed to the here and now, and her world at present is one of alcohol, meaningless sex, and blind escape. As a result, her future can only be a longed–for fantasy, over which she has no control. She is totally dependent on Jack to make it happen for her, and the reader can see that Jack has no intention of doing that. With her lack of experience, the narrator thinks that a baby’s breath after feeding smells like “vanilla.” Jack tells her how she is wrong about that (as wrong as she is about the future too): the baby’s breath is “bittersweet,” just like her sweet fantasy is about to turn “bitter” when she sees that this is all that she has in life, an empty delusion.

The narrator clearly reaches no perception. People who reach perception understand their lives and change their lives. The narrator in “No One’s a Mystery” remains totally incapable of change. She lives in a blind world where someone else is driving her where he wants to go. It’s his world. In patriarchy, the man assumes all the power and decision–making. The woman who allows that to happen has no say and no identity. She is a play thing at the mercy of another. Life is not a country and western song; it is a struggle to find out who you are and where you are going. This character is totally incapable of assuming that responsibility. Tallent’s narrator is a character who is totally blind, and does not realize that identity starts with oneself, not with another person. She is happy with her version of the story, her fantasy, as she says to Jack, “‘I believe mine’” (2). An ostrich puts its head in the ground in a determined effort to refuse to see reality. That is a metaphor for how I see the narrator in Elizabeth Tallent’s story. Tallent wrote this story to show us that she does not identify with the way the young woman thinks. Tallent expects readers to detect and criticize the simplistic romanticism that allows a person to live in a fantasy world. Love takes more than simply hoping for happiness. People have to build futures.

Tallent wrote “No One’s a Mystery” to show the reader what happens to someone who refuses to take responsibility for her destiny. It’s easy to get trapped in alcohol/drugs, dead-end relationships, and fantasies about how wonderful the future could be. If a person does not wake up and see how tough life is and prepare oneself for the future, then that future will lack depth. Jack asks the narrator how Roseanne Cash developed herself into a talent: “‘Do you think she’s getting famous because of who her daddy is or for herself?’” (1). The irony is clear. Irony operates in a story when the story presents a viewpoint which is totally opposite what the author believes. In this story, the narrator lives in a world where women are supposed to be totally dependent on having a “sugar daddy” to take care of a woman’s needs for her. And the narrator falls right into that trap. Elizabeth Tallent wrote this story in this way because she believes the opposite. If an individual is going to succeed, the only road to success depends on learning to work and study on one’s own. Tallent wrote this story to show every reader, especially women, how we cannot depend on men to get us where we are going. We have to take the wheel and drive in our own direction. What I realize from reading the story is a strong sense of how a person must trust oneself. If an individual does not know how to rely on oneself, that person can easily be taken advantage of by a sweet-talking type of guy, and there are plenty in the world. People have to see the difficult future, and not be blinded by romantic fantasies. Tallent makes me see that a blind life is no life at all.