The short story “Lust” is told from the point of view of a high school student who describes her sexual encounters. The beginning of the story is narrated by a girl who is nonchalant about her sexual encounters and emotionally detached throughout these encounters. Throughout the story, the girl changes and becomes more emotional about her encounters and what they leave her with. Susan Minot shows the changing psychological and negative effects that sex has on a high school girl and how she feels about these sexual encounters. In the critical essay “Lust,” Janet Ellerby summarizes and analyzes the short story “Lust.” Janet Ellerby describes the author's theme for the short story. The narrator of the story is “unprepared to face the pressure of male desire” and does not know the emotional connection that exists between intimacy. In the short story, there is a difference between men's and women's desire and attachment to emotions. Susan Minot also describes “what it means to open the heart.” The narrator feels that she cannot open her heart to the boys she meets. Ellerby describes that when the narrator lists her encounters, she does so without any emotional connection; it reads “more like a grocery list than an emotionally charged account of an erotic past.” This shows the narrator trying to give a more masculine attitude towards dating. Psychologically, the narrator has no emotional attachment to her partners at the beginning of the story and seems withdrawn from her experiences. The story begins to take a turn and the narrator is psychologically negatively affected. At the beginning of the story, the girl is nonchalant about sex and is emotionally detached from her actions and the boys she meets....... middle of paper ... without the story. The narrator is not bothered at the beginning of the story, but by the end she feels almost "ruined." The girl starts out feeling nonchalant about her sexual encounters and is not emotionally attached to them. Throughout, the narrator struggles to open her heart and she does not consider any of her partners boyfriends. She starts to feel like boys look at her differently after sex, and that's all they expected from her. She feels like she has certain limits: the things she can ask of her partners, what she gives to her partners. After sex, she feels like a part of her is ruined and she feels alone. Before, there is a tenderness given to him by his partner. Afterwards, she lies there almost dead, with the feeling that something inside her is ruined. Her partner no longer looks at her like he used to. He no longer sees her; she disappeared.