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Monologue For An Onion By Suji Kwock Kim

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Monologue For An Onion By Suji Kwock Kim
28 April 2013
Monologue of an Onion Analysis

People search forever to find true love, but true love will never be found if you can’t find true love within yourself. In the poem “Monologue for an Onion”, by Suji Kwock Kim, the metaphor isn’t just about the onion it’s also about being loved. Everyone falls in love at least once. And this love feels everlasting and perfect, as if it’s never going to end. Then, when the moment of heartbreak happens, it feels as if the world is crumbling right in front of you. People have different ways of handling a broken heart. Whether it’s denial, anger, or sadness, the feeling of not being loved is surreal. In this poem, the onion is a man that is no longer in love with his significant other and tells how
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He is trying to tell his significant other that he isn’t in love with her anymore. He states from the beginning, “I don’t mean to make you cry.” (1) He is trying not to cause any pain, but she doesn’t want to hear what he has to say. She is so in love in fact, she’s delusional. The onion, saying she’s not seeing clearly, states this. “How will you rip away the veil of the eye.” (20)

His significant other is so angry she keeps “chopping and weeping,” (12) like an idiot for love, to find the answer that she ultimately wants to hear. She starts with the husk of the onion, and then the flesh, peeling away layer-by-layer trying to get her ultimate answer. The onion tells her “hunt all you want” (8), letting her know that she won’t find what she’s looking for within him. She does this by “slashing away skin after skin” (15). With all this anger that’s filled inside of her trying to find the answer she really wants, she filled with “ruin and tears your only sign of progress”
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She hasn’t grasp the thought of him not loving her so he tells her to open her eyes and stop seeing what she wants to see, but to see what is actually there. “You must not grieve that the world is a glimpsed through veils.” (18) With blurred vision, and broken hearted she tries to understand him when he says, “That you are, you want to grasp the heart of things, hungry to know where meaning lies.” (21-22) He’s simply telling her that she can’t get what she always wants. Like a child asking a million questions or a lion hunting his prey, the answer is right in front of her. But still she denies that answer because it still isn’t the one she seeks.

Still she tries to break him down, “yellow peels, my stinging shreds”(24). He tells her after she still keeps going, and going that after all the questions, begging and pleading “you are the one in pieces” (25). She leaves herself vulnerable to anything he has to say. The onion seems a little more kind hearted when he states, “Whatever you meant to love, in meaning to you changed yourself” (25-26) meaning that all this love she as confessed to him and obsessed over him, has changed who she really is. He wonders if after all the love she has given him, has she left any for

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