The Kiss by David Swartz - Essay Example

The characters are very uncommon for a love story. Gracie is an MS patient confined to a wheelchair with "the plastic bag dangling from the bottom of her chair, a loop of yellow fluid angling up to enter a slit in the trousers." She is needy and unloved and desperate for affection. Tommy is potentially gay, being turned off by anything sexual about the female flesh and anxious to get to someone named Barry outside.

There is nothing in the plot that suggests a typical love story. It starts in mid-relationship, giving the reader no sense of how he made her fall in love with him or why she did. Their relationship seems very shallow as he is little more than the guy who pushes her wheelchair from one part of the hospital to another, having very little interaction at the starting or ending points. The story ends with Tommy kissing Gracie on the mouth, disgusted the whole time he's doing it, and with no sense of whether he will actually come by to see her again in the future.

Through setting, characters and plot, Schwartz presents a love story that has very little to do with the conventional concepts of what such a story should entail.