Girl, Interrupted pgs 1-38

Summary

This first section of the book is all about how the protagonist, Susanna Kaysen, ended up in a mental institution in Belmont Massachusetts. I found this intriguing because she is so close to home. She had only one fifteen or twenty minuet session with a psychiatrist before he decided to send her to the nut house. Out of Georgina, Lisa,and Daisy, three other patients at McLean Hospital where she is staying, she is one of the most sane. The craziest thing she has done is attempt suicide by an overdose on asprin. Georgina set herself on fire once and Daisy is anorexic and obssessed with chickens. At this point in the book it hard to tell why she is still a patient at the hospital when she seems prettty sane.

Quote
"In the parallel universe the law of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down; a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest; and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal opposite reaction." (Kaysen 6)

Reaction
The way the second sentence in the quote is broken into 3 different thought puts more emphasis on the message the author is trying to get across. She is saying she entered a different world when she went to McLean hospiteal and in that world, she had to expect the unexpected. this quote is particularly significant because it foreshadows that surprising events will occur later on in the book. Events that the reader willl be surprised at because in her world, which we enter as soon as we turn to the first page, nothing follows the rules of reality.