The Awakening

Kate Chopin's literary masterpiece The Awakening addresses the question: do our everyday actions effect our lives in the long run? in a very unique and almost subtle way.

When Edna chooses to marry out of pure lust, she ends up living a life full of unwarranted passion for other men, lack of interest in her children, and udder unhappiness about her situation-despite her beauty and wealth. The novel ends with Edna's suicide, only after she is deserted by the only man she ever cared for. Edna's hasty and unreasonable marriage may have given her brief satisfaction, but her lonliness and pain were the factors that eventually ended her life. She chose to kill herself by walking into the ocean, and being unable to swim, ended up being engulfed in the waves, just as she was engulfed in her own misery and passion.