to reason that measuring time does not benefit him to fight it or to help his wife, instead of wasting the time with something useless, enjoying every moments is
more beneficial for him.
2. Sarah Lemon
Sarah is the character with the most explanations about how she feels because the main problem that she has is love. She wants love from her father,
from the society, and from Ethan. She has issues with her confidence and she thinks that nobody likes her because of her appearance. As explained in the
previous section, the trigger of her inner conflict is the kiss that she shares with Ethan.
And then the kiss. She would never forget that. She felt his breath on the nape of her neck and she turned to the left, but he edger onto her right, so
she turned back that way and their faces nearly bumped —and it happened.
It just happened. She closed her eyes and honestly, she almost fainted her mother used to say the word “swoon,” and Sarah have a vague idea this is
that, and he kissed her again, harder, and turned her toward him and grabbed her closer, and she remembered thinking
Me, he’s kissing me, he wants me Albom, 2012: 95
As they kissed, she finally feels that someone wants her. She knows that he is out of her league because he is on a whole different level from her. Since she is
overwhelmed by the feeling that someone wanted her, she keeps on believing that he really wants her. She is in love with him, but she knows that actually he does
not have the same feeling. As she actually knows the truth if Ethan does not love her back, she keeps
on trying to forget that truth and chase after him. She keeps on believing in her bad faith. She buys him a gift with the hope that he would love her back. She feels
certain anxiety when she has to run after him, but she ignores that. However, she has to accept the error of her faith when this happened:
But before she finished, before she said the last words of “I just really
—I know it’s crazy—I just love you, you know?” he began rolling his eyes as if he are looking for some friend to say, ‘Can you believe this?’
She wanted to melt into the ground at that moment, just hot wax into a puddle and disappear through a sewer gate. His eyes. That look. No
interest. Total humiliation. Albom, 2012: 142 At this point, she feels that feel of severe anxiety and she becomes aware of her
error in perceiving the reality. The anxiety becomes severe because she actually has known the reality, but she hides the truth by creating her own imagination and
believes on it. Deep down, she feels the anxiety every time she knows that she is the one chasing him. However, the anxiety does not shown because she hides it
with the bad faith. So when the bad faith meets reality, she becomes in anguish. As described in the theory, anguish is the awareness that a person has to stand
alone, without anyone else to hold the total and final responsibilities as the result of severe anxiety. She knows that she decided to forget the truth when Ethan is
not within her grasps and she already realized that she chooses to keep on believing on her imagination.
She feels so lonely when he saw his reaction. At the same time, her trauma of being left behind overwhelms her. She feels that nobody wanted her again.
Moreover, when she finally sees the post on Ethan’s Facebook page the next day, she starts to think that there are no more people who could love her. This is shown
by the way she reacts in this fragment: She ran, shivering, in lightly falling snow, tears streaming down her face
and hardening the cold. There is no one to talk to. No one to comfort her.
There is blackness and solitude and she is never, ever going back to that school again. Albom, 2012: 152
She feels that everyone has left her. She doesn’t try to see things around her such as her mother or the people in the shelter. She is blinded by the fact that the
people she wants to be in her life never want her. As a result, she feels that there is nobody around her who could help or understand her. This is the feeling of
forlornness. At this point, she is in forlorn. As the effect of the forlornness and anguish, she loses her hope. She tries
to seek for answers for her problems. However, she wants to get the truth as soon as possible. As existentialists said, it is impossible to get the truth as soon as
possible since they start to contradict their own mind and it make their hope disappear Camus, 1955: 13. So, instead of finding the truth and answers of her
questions, she feels the total despair. She feels that the world can no longer offer her anything more. She becomes too anxious about believing that someone might
want her and she is dissatisfied with the hopes. Because she feels that it is too much for her to take, she wants to stop her pain and she chooses suicide.
The absurd is when “man feels an alien, a stranger” Camus, 1955: 5. When her hope does not meet the reality, it is the absurd that she has to face. The
absurd condition that she could not accept is the fact that she could no longer life in her bad faith. Since Ethan shows clearly that he has no interests, her bad faith is
broken and she falls in despair. Therefore, she chooses suicide as the answer. Based on the fairytale-like story plotline, Sarah is able to meet Dor and see
the future just before she is about to kill herself. In the story, she is shown the
reality that her death means nothing to Ethan but it breaks the heart of the people who actually love her.
She wanted to blame him, to blame her whole rotten existence. But seeing Ethan, seeing her mother, seeing the world after the world she has
known, somehow took her to the very bottom the end of self-delusion, and the truth enveloped her like a cocoon, and all she said is, “I was so lonely.”
And Father Time said, “You are never alone.” Albom, 2012: 194 When she knows the result of her choice, she learns something. Her mind starts to
reasoning against the conditions that she has to face in present time. By seeing the future, she understands that actually killing herself does not give her any good or
making Ethan regrets for what he had done. She also sees the truth that she still has people who care about her. Even though she knows that she does not have a
good relationship with her mom, but she knows that she cares. Somebody still wants her. People in the shelter also miss her when she never comes in the future.
She learns that when she says she is so lonely, she just does not want to open herself to the people who have loved her. She is never truly alone like Father
Time who has to live in the cave. She still has hope for making things better. Back to the absurd condition that she has to face, her action to commit
suicide is the result of total despair which triggers two options: the “recovery or
suicide” Camus, 1955: 10. As she learns the future result of her decision in the present time, the rationalization helps her to recover from the total despair she has
in present time. The appearance of Father Time makes her able to jump to the future and learns about the truth she faces in the future. And as she able to go back
to present time, the rationalization resulted from the lesson she got makes her able to move on and alter the choice from suicide into recovery.
Other than the absurd condition and how she reacts toward the absurd, there is also an interesting bias to see from this character. If the existentialists
prefer to use the word ‘man’ as a reference for human and ‘he’ as a person, the storyline also shows that Sarah is the only character who chooses the suicide. She
is the only woman main character who faces the absurd and she is the only one who gives up her life. Therefore, this shows that actually the world in this present
time still follows that bias against gender. Woman somehow is shown as the one with weaker mentality than the man. She does fight in the end, but she does so just
because she is being helped first by a man Father of Time. This places woman as the weaker one rather than man.
3. Victor Delamonte
