The Outsider by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer

The Outsider by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
Name
Institution

The outsider is a memoir written by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer, the son of a university professor Charles Lachenmeyer (Berger, 2003). He narrates how a mental disease, Schizophrenia, which has no known cure, robbed of his father; the disease was later realized to have cost him his career, sanity and later his family. Charles was a highly intelligent man with a promising career but died in absolute poverty. The author tries to reconstruct the events of his father’s death and the time his parents separated which was fourteen years back. Nathaniel realizes that his father had been hospitalized many times before his death, and this makes him try to retrace the latter period when they were not together. The divorce seemed to have greatly affected his father psychologically and perhaps to lead to his illness. He remembers how he, together with his parents cried when his mother told his father that she wanted to file for a divorce. No rational being would like to have imagined that their family was over. His mother seemed to have been disturbed by some psychological conditions resulting from his father, perhaps which she could not discuss with anybody. She could regularly get upset by the behavior of Charles, perhaps one of the reasons for the divorce (Berger, 2003, P.24). The author tries to evaluate his role and where he failed in a bid to rescue his father out of the situation. He describes his flaws and conclu…