Summary
Part 11 starts with an anatomical diagram of the human body with an artificial heart inside of its chest. The prose starts with an anecdote about Robert Tools, who was the first patient to ever receive an artificial heart. He said that the weirdest thing about having an artificial heart is not having a heartbeat. The speaker notes how private and lonely he must have been; there was no one in the world who could relate to him. He was "the only living being without a heartbeat, he had a whirr instead" (71). The speaker describes the whir of Mr. Tools's heart as being like white noise; it is "the fast repetitive whirr of a machine whose insistent motion might eventually seem like silence" (71). The speaker goes on to tell us that the entire apparatus weighed about 4 pounds. For people who are not Mr. Tools, the whir of the machine is only detectable with a stethoscope. For Mr. Tools, the whir reminds him of his existence.
After this, one of the speaker's friends drops by for a visit and they go to eat pizza around the corner from the speaker's apartment. While they are eating, the friend tells the speaker that she didn't like the book the speaker had recommended to her, Coetzee's Disgrace. After the friend says this, the speaker smiles and feels amused, because to her, it doesn't really matter whether or not her friend liked the book. She then recommends Zadie Smith's White Teeth to her friend. The friend wants to keep taking about Disgrace and tells the speaker that she doesn't know why so many intelligent people like it. The speaker and the friend discuss what the book is about. Finally, the friend asks "what woman hasn't been raped" in response to the fact that the main character of the book ignores a rape (72). When they depart, the speaker thinks to herself that "surely some percentage of women hasn't been raped" and considers looking it up on Google (72). There is a picture of an empty search bar beneath these words. Following the image, the speaker muses that saying "'what woman hasn't been raped' could be another way of saying 'this is the most miserable in my life'" (72).
For the final section of Part 11, the setting changes to the Caribbean. When the speaker gets sick while on vacation, the doctor prescribes her a medication that is expired. When she tells the nurse that the medication is expired, the nurse asks the speaker if she has liver disease or if there is a chance she could be pregnant. Since neither of these conditions apply to her, the fact that the medicine is expired is only a "bothersome fact," nothing more (73). The nurse answers "well" and the speaker leaves the doctor's office with the pills (73). After the speaker leaves the clinic, she goes to a bar on the beach and watches the waves come in. The speaker then takes the medication and notes that she has no adverse reaction to it.
In Part 12, the speaker is with her sister. She asks her sister if she has seen the commercial for Diflucan, which is a yeast-infection medication that is "less messy than the suppository Monistat" (77). The speaker then points out the irony in the fact that even though Diflucan is less messy, one of its potential side effects is liver damage, which should make it an inferior medication to Monistat but is not being advertised as such. The speaker finds this irony amusing, but her sister does not mention it because she is distracted. She is being forced to compile a folder with items from her children's' lives for an insurance adjuster.
The speaker's sister tells the speaker that she has to meet with the insurance adjuster, who she has spoken with on the phone. The insurance adjuster wants her to think of the folder on her children as a "scrapbook" containing "report cards, medical records, extracurricular activities" (77). The speaker notes that her sister isn't crying; instead, she is irritable. The speaker asks her sister the same questions she asked the adjuster and gets annoyed at "this reflection of herself" (77).
The speaker reveals that she had previously read an article about insurance adjusters in Harper's but does not want to tell her sister about it because she doesn't want to generalize her sister's experience and detract from its specificity. The speaker notes that her knowledge of insurance adjusters comes from the author of the piece while her sister's knowledge comes from her real life. The speaker and her sister discuss what should be included in the folder. They agree on a lot of it. The speaker tells us that each item included in the folder is a "sign" that points to the economic worth of these children in the eyes of the insurance adjuster. All of this is "a place of compensation divorced from compassion" (78). The speaker's sister will receive monetary compensation, but it will not help her grieve the loss of her children.
Analysis
The person introduced in Part 11, Mr. Tools, is a real person who was in the media a lot at the turn of the 21st century because he was the recipient of the first artificial heart. Rankine writes Tools' story in a very impersonal tone that emphasizes the loneliness and isolation that he faced in his life. Interestingly, Rankine mentions neither that Tools was African American nor that he died five months after receiving the artificial heart. The Notes at the back of the book detail the particulars of Tools story on page 144.The speaker uses repetition to note the subtle irony of a person named "Tools" having a mechanical device inside of him: "Mr. Tools had the ultimate tool in his body" (71).
In the Notes, Rankine describes the process of looking up sexual assault statistics online: "A search on Google for the keywords 'rape' and 'statistics' on November 17, 2003 at 8:22 p.m., followed by the command 'I'm feeling Lucky' turns up a web site entitled 'RAINN Statistics' ... According to RAINN, 14.8% of American women have been victims of completed rape and another 2.8% victims of attempted rape (approximately 1 in 6 women, all told)" (145). In this passage, the speaker does not talk about this matter with her friend and instead muses about it on her own after leaving their conversation. Rankine notes how reprehensible it is that one would even have to look such a statistic up: "Then I think, maybe, that 'what woman hasn't been raped' could be another way of saying 'this is the most miserable in my life'" (72). "This is the most miserable in my life" is a call-back to the speaker's friend with Alzheimer's from Part 2. In this way, the suggestion of a pool of numbers of women who have been sexually assaulted is syntactically connected to a state of huge grief or depression.
The speaker brings up two contemporary writers in her conversation with her friend at the pizza parlor. J.M. Coetzee is a South African novelist, essayist, linguist, and translator. In 2003, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His novel, Disgrace, was lauded by critics as a complex look into the political landscape of South America following apartheid. The speaker refers to Coetzee as a "naturalist" and then wonders what exactly she means by that term (72). In traditional literary analysis, naturalism is a style that depicts the human world as working according to natural laws, which are the rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural universe. Zadie Smith is a contemporary novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. White Teeth is about a trans-national friendship in wartime.
Part 12 is one of the main passages that deals with the theme of how one's life is valued by society. The speaker's sister is asked to help determine the monetary value of her dead children's lives for an insurance adjustor. On page 77, the speaker makes a distinction between "performing" a life and "living" a life: "What I know, I know because of Davidson; what she knows, she knows because she is being made to perform a life I don't want to live." Because the speaker's sister is compelled to create this scrapbook about her children even though it causes her pain, she is "performing" her life instead of "living" it—simply going through the motions. This passage is significant because it also brings up a few questions that are central to Don't Let Me Be Lonely: What is "truth" and where do we get it from? Can someone have knowledge of something by witnessing it second-hand or must it be experienced to be understood?
The motif of medication appears at the end of Part 11, when the speaker is on vacation, and again in Part 12. She is prescribed a medication that has already expired, which makes her question our practice of blindly taking what is prescribed to us without question. The list of the symptoms she does not have communicates anxiety about medication in general and surprise that she experienced no negative side effects: "I have no allergic reaction; no difficulty breathing; no closing of my throat; no swelling of my lips, tongue, or face; no hives" (73). This long and repetitive list also emphasizes the underlying potential risks that come with taking medication that people don't normally think about. In Part 12, the speaker finds a commercial for Diflucan humorous, as it is slightly more convenient than Monistat but poses a much greater risk: the possibility of liver damage. In this passage, the speaker is bringing attention to the fact that big pharmaceutical companies often ignore or hide serious health risks in order to sell a shiny new product to the public and make more money.
