Blue

Blue (Three Colors Trilogy)

I just found a one page paper I wrote in college about Blue, I figured I'd put it up.

Thesis: In Blue, Julie regains hope through the people around her and
gains the most important kind of freedom.

After losing her husband and daughter in a terrible car crash, Julie
most wants to get away from everything she's known. She wants to be free
of everything; no attachments. However, what she wants "to avoid is
disappointment." [M. 55] She wants to be free to avoid being hurt again.
So she proceeds to cut herself off from everything and everyone, hiding in
her little apartment with only a blue glass lamp to remind her of the past.
Somehow, even though she's doing her best to cut herself off from
others, and perhaps from her own emotions, her connections come back to
her. The boy brings back the necklace, Oliver finds her at the coffee
shop, and she finds the woman who had been her husband's mistress. She
even unintentionally makes new connections, such as with the whore who
needed her help. These people seem to be even more determined to connect
with Julie precisely because she has locked herself away so tightly.
It is these connections that allow Julie to regain her hope. They
force her to deal with the finite and not to get lost inside the infinite
nothingness of solitude.

".hope is always associated with a communion, no matter how interior
it may be. This is actually so true that one wonders if despair and
solitude are not at bottom necessarily identical." [M 58]

The love that Oliver gives and the compassion that the prostitute shows
begin to open Julie up. The finite is again confronting her, but this time
not in the horrifying and limiting way that it did in the crash. However,
it is not until she gives in and loves them back that she begins to release
herself from the prison of complete freedom from the finite. She begins to
trust that the finite will lead her somewhere. She is able to regain her
compassion, and begins to love with an intensity that transcends facts.
She even loves the woman who had her husband's heart in her place.
It was said that Julie had been a kind and compassionate person before
the accident. Upon first glance it may seem that she has returned to her
being. She lost herself and is now found. But it is more than that. The
return is there, but there is something else that is entirely new. It is a
freedom, not from the finite things in life, but in them. It is a freedom
fueled by love; a freedom to give love to those around her, and in turn to
allow her to see paradise in the dust of the streets.

Not much that has been said before, but I figured I'd post it anyway.

The last line is a reference to Denise Levertov's poem, City Psalm.