Baby in the Bottle (Reader's-Response)

Nowadays, abortion seems to be an easy thing. Teenagers who got pregnant accidentally will have abortion as their first choice to end their problem. The thing inside their stomach already has a life, even if it has only been days. There are women who wanted to have kids but they cannot have; abortion is not the best solution for this problem, there are still couples who need them and will love them. After the hard and exhausting work, most of the time, peoples next destination is their home. Home is a place where you feel that you belong, you are at ease and you have a peace of mind. Baby in the Bottle, tells the life of a couple who can never have a child. Mr. Libre was a clerk in the freight department of an import-export corporation. His tasks are sorting and recording receipts, which made him to stay on his desk for nine hours. After his work, he will go home directly, but that does not ease what he has been feeling. At his home, the place is quite and feels like no one is living. He and his wife did not have any proper and long conversation after their first and last child was born prematurely and died. His wife wanted to take the baby home and keep it with her, and so they placed it inside a bottle filled with alcohol. He can feel the pain his wife has been suffering, just seeing her looking at the baby in daze and holding it made him to feel sorry for her. When the baby died, Mr. Libre did not shed any tears, hes been holding them because it made him feel so helpless and he wanted to be strong for his wife. But it came to a time when he can no longer hold it and the tears fell from his eyes. Theme Importance of a child in a family A complete family is consisted of a mother, a father and kids. The children are the one who strengthen the relationship of the couple. They are the ones who make the home filled with laughter and smiles. The talk always returned to the past and how different it might have been if theyd had children. p (183). This sentence proves the importance of children in maintaining the happiness in a home. Mr. Libre and his wife seems like stranger to each other. The effect of the death of the baby made his wife to completely change, her eyes are not as bright as it should be, her face does not show any expression and when she smiled at him, an expression he had seen for the first time, it made him scared of the possibility that she does not recognize his husband. His wife sat on a cot staring at the baby bottle. She sat in the half dark a few feet away from the table where the bottle was. From where he stood he could see sharply the hollows of her eyes and her thin bloodless lips. Her face was totally without expression. Her hands were on her lap and she sat unmoving but when he came in and she saw him she turned slowly to him and her face broke out in a clumsy uncertain smile. It was slow halfsilly smile that twisted the corners of her mouth upwards and nothing else; her eyes remained sad and empty. He had never seen her that way. He was afraid she did not recognize him. p (187). Their relationship has affected Mr. Libres work, sometimes he could not concentrate on the things he should do and in front of him. His thought about his work got mixed with the thoughts about his wife and the baby, what his wife is doing and the condition of the baby. Concentration always came hard to Mr. Libre because sometimes in the middle of the day he would find it impossible to keep his thoughts off the many unrelated things that came into his mind. He would catch himself thinking of his wife eating lunch alone every day

or the cardboard wall of their room that seemed to close in on them or perhaps the dead baby submerged in its bottle of green alcohol. He thought of his wife a lot but many times he thought of the baby too. p (185). The author did not use any other means to show the theme to the reader. Even the title Baby in the Bottle literally means that the baby is inside a bottle. It is clearly stated in the story the importance of the baby in a family and its effects once it vanished. Tone Depressed Depression is a state of low mood and aversion to activity that can affect a persons thoughts, behavior, feelings and physical well-being. It may include feelings of sadness, anxiety, emptiness, hopelessness, worthlessness, guilt, irritability, or restlessness. Depressed people may lose interest in activities that once were pleasurable, experience difficulty concentrating, remembering details, or making decisions, and may contemplate or attempt suicide. The story gives off the feeling of helplessness, hopelessness, emptiness and sadness, all in all, being depressed. The author wrote the story in a way that sentences can show the feelings of the characters. Mr. Libre has been keeping his feelings to himself, he does not cry because for him it means his helpless, but both he and his wife has been suffering depression. The truth was, Mr. Libre felt sorry for his wife. He was very careful to hide it from her of course, but day by the day, through the years, he saw her watching the shriveled half-black baby in the bottle, he felt more and more sorry for her. She would touch the bottle gently once in a while, and run her hands fondly over the cold glass, inside, the stiff skinless body a four-inch boy now dead for five years, would bob up and down in the green alcohol. And then sometimes, slowly, to herself, she would smile. p (183). Here, the author used day by day and through the years to describe how long Mr. Libre has been suppressing how he felt for his wife. This paragraph also shows how Mrs. Libre felt, how she wanted to touch the baby, how she longed to hold it, and how she forced to smile, slowly to herself. Do you like the story? Why or Why Not? Both the sides of my mother and father had siblings that werent able to see the world, like what happened to the baby of Mr. and Mrs. Libre. But the result of what happened after was not like the same because their parents still have children. And last February 4, 2006, our family experienced the same case. The baby was also a boy and about four-inches, we placed him inside a bottle filled with alcohol. My father changes the alcohol every time it changes its color from clear to white. At that time when I learned about what happened and saw my parents and my sisters crying, I felt sad but I did not cry. But then when Im alone, I felt like crying and then I let the tears fall from by eyes. I like the story since it shows how fortunate we are, our family did not became like theirs. My parents did not stop and change the way they were before the accident, we still go on with our lives but it does not mean we will forget our little baby brother. When Im alone, I know our baby angel is with me, watching us, so the sadness I felt seemed to be lessened. Everything happens for a reason, what happened to us is a challenged and we become stronger because of that. The partner given to you is not just for display, the two of you have to cooperate with each other, help each other to overcome the challenges youre facing. You dont have to take it all to yourself, see and it will be better for the two of you.

Point out the parallelisms in the story and discus their function/s. Mr. Libres wife was a plain woman with high cheekbones and a sad mouth, who was only twenty-nine years old but whose eyes were no longer young. p (183) Mr. Libre himself was thirty-three but graying hair and some thick corded veins on his hands made him look older. p (183) It was a boy but it didnt even look like a baby. p (184) These sentences describe how each characters appearance is far from what they supposed to look like. They moved into a rented room which the owner said was the ground floor of a two story building but it was just a room actually, with thick cardboard walls to divide it into smaller rooms. They planned to move out few years because they thought the room would be too small for the children to come and they hoped to have many children Mr. Libre noticed too that his wife had changed. In the beginning she was no different at all, although at times she did fall into brooding. Then slowly for no apparent reason she grew quiet and kept to herself and that was when the baby in the bottle took a strange hold on her. He tried to understand her and be patient with her. she did not want to be the way she was, he told himself to live in a small cramped world of her own, to look at the baby, make up daydreams about it all day, want to touch it, hold it in her hands. She could not help any of it he knew and he did not stop her and day by day he got used to her being that way. But still he felt sorry for her. p (184-186) During the first few months and on to the end of that first year, the bottle had seemed too small for the baby. It looked as though it needed a glass jar with a lid instead of that bottle with a wide mouth, it floated limply on the surface and slumped against the glass sides. But after a while the alcohol seeped through it and hardened it and it sank stiffly to the bottom. Then little by little it blackened and shriveled up and it would neither float nor sink but bobbed up and down in its green world of alcohol and glass. And then the bottle didnt seem too small for the baby anymore because now the babys shrunken body was completely confined. The bottle fully contained it. p (185) These parts are parallel in a way that they both described the world Mrs. Libre and the baby is living, Mrs. Libre in their small room and the baby inside the bottle. After a while, both of them changed, overpowered by their own surrounding. Mrs. Libres life revolved around her room with her baby, then slowly she had changed, her attitude changed. Their house, which at first seems to be small, became a house enough for the two of them. On the other hand, the baby also had slowly changed, but in its appearance, his size had shrunk making the bottle enough for its size. Is Mrs. Libres inability to cope common? I understand why Mrs. Libre was not able to deal with what happened. They were looking forward to have children in their house, but the sudden death of their baby was a big shock for her, and then the news that she wont be able to bear any child, she felt so depress. Her inability to handle the incident is not common nowadays. There are couples who were not blessed with the ability to reproduce, of course they felt sad and hopeless, but after sometime they will adopt a child. The feeling of wanting to hold your own child, the child from your own blood, is different from holding just a random kid, but youll be able to

help and give love to the kid that his/her parent did not care and love him/her. Think of it as the purpose of your life, its to help the others. Is the title appropriate? The Baby in the Bottle, when I read the title, I already thought that it might literally mean a baby inside a bottle. This simple title given by the author made it easy for the readers to understand just like the way he wrote the story. The story is not the same us others who uses a lot of difficult words and literary devices that made it hard to understand by others. The author, Benjamin Bautista, is a citizen of our country, he had the idea of what happens to the ordinary when something like that happened to them. His target readers might be ordinary people, the Filipinos, the title does not have to be amusing, the storys message is more important.