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

It’s a universally know truth that death is certain and people cannot 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. Simmons’s story describes the way the society and people would function if people were brought back from the dead. The title of the story is ironic since rivers run downstream and not upstream and it’s also not coincidental that the river Styx is a river which according to Greek 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 understanding 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 actio ns will have 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 never 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, â€Å"...her face was flushed and healthy, almost sunburned. Her skin wasn't 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 â€Å"stroke†, but he failed to realize that the stoke isn’t temporary and it won’t be nurse back ... ...ir peers, no one will speak to them in school 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 don’t make the effort to befriend them. The boys are shunned from their social circle and are forced to just play together all the time. Both the boys have trouble falling asleep, and the older boy, Simon, always has the same reoccurring nightmare about his mother â€Å"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.