...The Rental Heart is a short story written by Kirsty Logan. In this science fiction story we follow the main characters use of rental hearts. You can rent hearts as many times as you want to, and you can put them in your chest, so whenever you get your heart broken, you can just go to the rental store and rent a new one, and that’s what this story is about. The Rental Heart isn’t written chronologic, so it leaps in time. In this story the narrator also uses flashbacks: “Jacob was as solid and golden as tilled field, and our love was going to last forever, which in our age meant six months. Every time Jacob touched me, I felt my heart thud wetly against my lungs”. In the beginning we hear about the main character telling us, that is was the day after he met Grace he went to the rental store, where he hasn’t been for over ten years. When we hear what he thinks of Grace and the rental hearts, we get a feeling of a problem. We don’t know how many years the story courses, but we’ll assume that it’s from the main character is a teenager, to he is an adult person, because he tells us that his first love was meant to last forever and at their age it meant six months. We can tell that the story takes place in future, because you can rent hearts. The main character can be both a man and a woman, because the person is attracted both sexes, and therefor is bisexual. The story is written in first person narrator, and we hear the story from the main characters point of...
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...The rental heart The rental heart by Kirsty Logan is about a person who is dating a lot of people and gets heartbroken every time they part ways so the main character goes to the heart rental place and rents a new heart to mend their broken heart. Throughout the story we hear about seven different partners, both men and women. The main character is currently dating Grace but looks back to past relationships. We are not told if the main character is male or female, so my interpretation is they could be gender neutral or a woman just like the author, it might be written from personal experience. She dates a lot of people, so she’s desperate for other people’s affection, but she can’t deal with the pain that comes with it, so every time she breaks up with someone she rents a new heart. She’s bisexual because she has partners that are both male and female. We don’t get any information about the setting, but it’s in the future because you can open your chest and switch out your heart for a new one. It’s a first-person narrative so we only see it from the main character's point of view. The rental hearts are a symbol of broken machinery that needs to be replaced, so the broken heart is equivalent to being heartbroken in real life. And opening your chest can be a symbol of opening your heart to other people. The whole story is a symbol of having your heart broken, wishing to replace your heart and to forget bad memories. Her first love was Jacob, and she was very in love with...
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...Analysis of ”The Rental Heart” The Rental Heart is a story about heartbreak and having to cope with it afterwards. In this story however, it is possible to return the shattered heart and replace it with a new one. In a sense, you avoid the heartbreak and move on without the emotional scarring you endure from getting your heart broken. The story is set in a utopian world where it is possible to rent a mechanical heart thus not having to deal with any real emotions, particularly heartbreak. Starting with a four-year-old relationship ending and a corporeal heart shattered, we follow the love life of the narrator over many years until he/she finally, several rental hearts later, finds someone to love wholeheartedly again. The heart in this story is described as a mechanical one: a box where all emotions and memories of a relationship are stored until you replace it with a new one. Words such as, “sleeker”, “smaller” and “smooth” are used to describe the hearts. In the world we live in today, words such as those are usually used to describe a smartphone or a fancy car. The heart is therefore materialistic, something that can be bought and, when you are done using it, thrown away like garbage. The interesting part is that in real life, the heart does not possess any emotions or control how we feel about another human being. It is all in our heads: memories, feelings, pictures etc. are all stored in our brain. The heart is just a muscle that pumps blood around in our body to keep...
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...The Rental Heart – Kirsten Logan Without a heart your body is useless. When your heart stops beating, you live until your brain dies from lack of oxygen, but in this short story the narrator lives perfectly fine while changing hearts. This short story is basically about restarting peoples’ ability to love, but also of how real love can overcome technology in place to fake it. This subject is exactly what the main character is dealing with in the short story “The Rental Heart”. That leads me to the setting of the story. The shorty, “The Rental Heart” is written by Kirsten Logan in 2010. We do not know where and when the short story takes place. Neither do we know if the main character is a he or she. In my interpretation of the short story, I have interpreted the main character as being a she. The main character is portrayed by a third person limited narrator, because we hear the story from the main characters point of view. Seen from the main characters point of view we get a description of the surroundings and feelings the main person is dealing with. The short story has two big flashbacks. Grace is first presented as the girl the main character falls in love with, with no risk of being hurt. On the way to the rental place the narrator looks back and remembers all the times it has been done before and in the end we see the narrator in Grace’s arms again. In the beginning of the short story, we get introduced to the “heart rental place”. This is a place where u can rent a heart...
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...The Rental Heart – analytical essay The human heart is an organ that pumps blood throughout the body; it helps the body create oxygen so we can live. The heart is a crucial part of the human anatomy, and a part we cannot live without. Despite being so important, is the heart only the size of a large fist, but if the heart is not beating then there is no life. That is the physical description of the hart, but what about the psychological description of the heart? What does it mean when you get your heart broken for the first time? Will it never heal? Can you ever fix a broken heart? In the short story the rental heart written by Kirsty Logan, we are introduced to the problem of a broken heart, and hos the protagonist in the story deals with having his/her heart broken repeatedly throughout the story. The short story is about a guy/girl telling us about his life with heartbreak, every relationship were he/she got his/her heart broke by the person he/she was in love with. It is about how he/she deals with the pain and sadness that comes with a broken heart. Every time a relationship ends the protagonist takes the broken heart out of his/her chest, and rents a new heart he/she can replace it with. The story is not written chronologically, it is set up like a time line, we start out in present time, and afterwards we go back in time as the protagonist talks about his/her former love stories. The first person the protagonist tells us about is Grace, and she is the last person...
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...The rental heart Often when you fall in love you will end up with a broken heart. That happens to everyone at some point. But why not just go and rent a new heart? That is what he is doing in the text and what the story is about. And yes I think the main character is a boy, because if it was a girl, that had got her heart broken, it would be much more dramatic. The main character keeps getting hurt, so instead of dealing with the pain, he just visit the heart rental place, and rent a new heart. But even though he keeps getting a new heart, in someway it does not make him fully recoverer. Because the pain is not only in your heart ,it is also in your mind. So even though the pain in the heart is gone, the pain in the mind is still there. The title “ The rental heart” is very describing for the text. Often when you read a text, the title does not really have so much to do with the rest of the story. But that is not the case in this story. Because this story is about a guy, getting his heart broken, and the rent hearts. So the title is very appropriate. His first love was Jacob, and it is clearly that he was very much in love with him. “Jacob was as solid and golden as tilled field, and our love was going to last forever, which in our age meant six months. Every time Jacob touched me, I felt my heart thud wetly against my lungs”. The story takes use of flashbacks, as you can see in the quote above. The main character is definitely bisexual, he is in to girls as well...
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...intuitively in our guts. But how does it work? Is there an extrasensory perception in the heart that is able to read the feelings in another person’s heart? Love is an assortment of contrasting feelings. To ask, “What is love?” would be the same as asking, “What is running?” or “What is swimming?” If you ever seen someone run or swim, you know exactly what running and swimming entail. The story “The Rental Heart” deal with love and the feeling you get when love fails you. When you are in love everything seems much better but when you break up everything turns dark and empty. It is for most people a fact, that you during your lifetime are going to get your heart broken. The heartbroken feeling of an endless pain that never goes away. Have you ever thought about, ripping out your broken heart, and change it with a new functional heart that will spare you from the heartbroken pain. No? Maybe it is because it is not a possibility in our world, but in “The Rental Heart” the reality is a bit different. The short story is a science fiction story written by the author Kirsty Logan in 2010. The story is told by a first person narrator who also is the protagonist of the story. Try to imagine a life where broken hearts is not an option. That is how the society works in “The Rental Heart”. It is a world where instead of feeling the awful pain of heartbreaks, you can just change your heart at the local heart rental place. Kirsty Logan uses the saying heartbroken literally in this short story. When...
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...stories. However, getting your heart broken at some point in your life is inevitable. For some, it happens more than once. This is the case for our main character in the short story “The Rental Heart”, by Kirsty Logan. To begin with, the reader has no clue as to whether the main character is a boy or a girl. In my head though, I got the image of a girl. The story is about this girl, who gets her heart broken over and over again, by boys as well as girls (she is bisexual). It’s not really a problem for her, because she can just go to the heart rental place and get a new one right away, ready for the next person in line. It’s nothing but a piece of machinery, capable of loving another human being. When you’re done with that person, or the other way around, you just go back the rental place and order a new heart. It’s very smart actually. But just like any other machinery, cogs and bolts get rusty, and sometimes you get a defect device. How many times can you get your heart broken then? If you can just go change it once it’s broken, surely you would be able to get it broken as many times as you would need? That’s not the case for our main character. With her last girlfriend in the story, Grace, she finds out that she has a defect heart, and when she goes to check it, it’s all dusty and empty. She literally has “a broken heart”. This is the main theme in the story. What the writer is trying to tell us is, that if you keep making bumps and dents in your heart, in the end it will break...
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...Kirsten Logan “The Rental Heart” Essay Love is hard, especially when we live in a world with so many millions of people, different, every single human being, so unique and away from other human beings on the earth. We live in a world were hatred, war and racism has dominated for years. And we keep asking ourselves, why? Why do we still need love? Why can’t we live without it, and sometimes can’t live with it? What does it mean for us, when our hearts tell us to fell something for other humans? Its questions we keep asking ourselves because we don’t know how to handle love, how to control it, how to balance between our bad and good emotions and in the end we don’t know what real love is, before getting heart, maybe a few times. Love, emotions, a broken heart that never ends feeling empty, it’s basically what the story is about in the novel “the Rental Heart”. The short story presents a protagonist as neuter story teller. We don’t really know anything about this person, which sex the teller has, looks, anything from the outside besides the tellers thoughts and the chronological story that tells about the various attempts at love. The narrator introduces us to many different types of persons “she” had a relationship with. but that isn’t the focus we have in the novel, it is really about the questions we have on the persons’ sex’. The narrator keeps switching sex on “her” lovers, and sometimes we wonder if “she” switches “her” own sex. for example the narrators switching personality...
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...base of something symbolic, with vivid descriptions? ‘The Rental Heart’ is a science fiction short story, which is about an unknown character. It is assumed that the story is takingtakes place way out in the future, since all authentic hearts are replaced by mechanisms in the story. The story focuses on the feelings of the main character – the main character is heartbroken. Also remember to write the title and writer of the text The story and the main character in the story are mysterious. We are not informed about anything other than the main character’s feelings. No name is introduced, no gender or age. The gender is hard to guess because of the variation of the lovers’ genders. The story is told in first person point of view and therefore it is very subjective in the descriptions. The needs for the main character, to do some specific tasks are emphasized in the story by repeating some phrases . This makes the story such more creepy and mysterious. It is not only the main character that w e do not get to hear any specific detail about. The setting and the time of the story are is not mentioned. We are only informed that the main character travels to an island, at a point, to escape from all the misery and pain from his/her past relationships. The social and cultural environment is not described directly; however, interpreting the text,it seems that the main character suspects that her/his lover has a real heart : “(…) We never mentioned it; I could not stand to think...
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...Essay – ”The Rental Heart” Love. Love can be good and love can be bad, although love is the most important thing in the world. Love is something we can’t be without, because where there is love – there is life. You see love in many different connections. Everyone has their own point of view on love. No one really knows the actual meaning of love – which makes love a mystery that many creative souls are trying to solve. The story “The Rental Heart” written by Kirsty Logan in 2010 deals with the feelings of loving another person. During this essay, the science fiction and the symbolism in “The Rental Heart,” will be analyzed. Kirsty Logan, who is a writer of fiction and journalism, also wrote the short story “The Rental Heart.” The story is written from Kirsty Logan’s own experiences with love, as she many years ago dated different people. The first time she got hurt, she was shattered and felt like nothing. The many negative thoughts in her head gave her the idea of pretending as if she had a Rental Heart, as she says in one of her blog posts on her website, “I pretended that I had a rental heart. I pretended that I could use it to be with someone and then return it afterwards, that it would be like nothing ever happened. I made sure that no-one I went out with left a scratch on me.” Later on, she met a girl, Susie, who became her inspiration for her story, “The Rental Heart”, as she proved to her that true love exists. In the short story, we do not know the gender of the...
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...The Rental Heart The Rental Heart is a short story which borders on real science fiction. It contains science fictions elements like hearts which do not have to be a part of your body. You can take it out and buy a new one to help you get to love the person you are currently with. Heartbeats can be attuned to help please the lover, too. And if you get your heart broken, it literally will be broken. Then you can go to a rental place and get a new one, to help you feel love again. The story is a frame story with two big flashbacks. At first Grace is presented as the girl the main character wants to fall in love with, with no risk of being hurt. On the way to the rental place the narrator looks back and recalls all the times it has been done before and in the end we see the narrator in Grace’s arms again. The story takes the expression “To be heartbroken” literally and paints a picture of how your heart might look after being hurt. “When Jacob left, I felt my heart shatter like a shotgun pellet, shards lodging in my guts” (line 30). The heart is not only a symbol of love but also of life, because your life depends on your heart to beat. When your heart stops beating, you live until your brain dies from lack of oxygen, but in this short story the narrator lives perfectly fine while changing hearts. The story is basically about restarting peoples’ capacity to love, but also of how real love can over-come technology in place to fake it. When we hear of the narrator falling in...
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...Below is a free essay on "The Rental Heart Analysis" from Anti Essays, your source for free research papers, essays, and term paper examples. The Rental Heart Often, when you break-up with a partner, you get your heart broken. It happens to everyone, but in this text, instead of experiencing sadness and sorrow, you can just take your rental heart out, and by a new one when you meet a new partner. I consider the main character a boy, because if it was a girl, there would be a lot of drama and a lot of details of heartbrokenness when they break-up. The main character is bisexual; his first love was a boy, Jacob, and at that time he was a teenager, which is shown in the text, when he says: “And our love was going to last forever, which at our age meant six months.” When we are teenagers, our body is filled with hormones. We fall in love easily and often, and just as quickly as we fall in love, we fall out of it again. When the main character is with a guy named Will, they go on a holiday, they went through security and the main character beeps, he shows the security people his heart and is waved on, but Will doesn’t beep. It makes the main character sick that he doesn’t have a metal heart and his gut is filled with blood and flesh. The short story’s title is “The Rental Heart”. Short story’s titles have often not much to do with the rest of the text and often it is a bit hidden in the text, but in this case it is very easy to see why the author called it that: it’s...
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...words) in which you analyse and interpret Kirsty Logan’s short story “The Rental Heart”. Part of your essay must focus on the use of symbols and on science fiction elements in the short story. You may use information from the Internet in your essay. Kirsty Logan. “The Rental Heart”, 2010 (PDF) Kirsty Logan’s short story begins with: ”i met Grace” and ”the day after i met her, I went to the heart rental place.” Disse to citater er meget vigtige, centrale og symbolske med et element af science fiction i forhold til budskabet og temaet. De danner grundlag for hele historien, som handler om forvirrende kærlighed og forelskelse ”The rental place” er et virkeligt sted, med skilt på døren, hvor man kan gå ind og leje et nyt hjerte ”technolegy moved fast,” ”the new hearts had extras….. like timers and standby buttons”. Science fiction elementet, hvor man lejer et hjerte, når det gamle er skadet, kan også siges at være en meget rund metafor for det at blive forelsket, ulykkelig kærlighed, at komme videre og date nye. Den urealistiske verden og det mystiske place er en hjælp for hovedpersonen og nævnes mange gange. ”Hjerte” er et symbol på forelskelse og kærlighed. Rental er at låne noget nyt af andre, i dette science fiction tilfælde, at låne et nyt hjerte, når det gamle er slidt og, at komme videre. Ved hjælp af the rental place er hovedpersonen usårlig. dette fører til temaet som kommer af ”rental” der indebærer forvirring, trang til udskiftning, manglende selvkontrol og...
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...goosebumps writing numbers on my palm. The day after I met her, I went to the heart rental place. I hadn’t rented in years, and doubted they would have my preferred model. The window display was different, the hearts sleeker and shinier than I remembered. The first time I had rented it was considered high-tech to have the cogs tucked away; now they were as smooth and seamless as a stone. Some of the new hearts had extras I’d never seen, like timers and standby buttons and customised beating patterns. That made me think about Grace, her ear pressed to my sternum, listening to the morse 10 code of her name, and my own heart started to creep up my throat so I swallowed it down and went into the shop. An hour later I was swallowing lunch and trying to read the instruction leaflet. They made it seem so complicated but it wasn’t really. The hearts just clipped in, and as long as you remembered to close yourself up tightly then they could tick away for years. Decades, 15 probably. The problems came when the hearts got old and scratched: shreds of the past got caught in the dents, and they’re tricky to rinse out. Even a wire brush won’t do it. But the man in the rental place had assured me that this one was factory-fresh, clean as a kitten’s tongue. Those heart rental guys always lied, but I could tell by the heart’s coppery sheen that it hadn’t been broken yet. 20 I remembered perfectly well how to fit the heart, but I still read the leaflet to the end as a distraction. A way to not...
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