After she left, he became bitter. One day he complained to me that she wasn't really gone at all, that she was much too wicked for such a mercy. She was still there, he said, stuck in him: a froth in the veins, a disease of the blood. That's how I began to think of her, as a sickness, a betrayal on the cellular level. My decision to stay with him became a badge of loyalty, and I brandished it in her face as often as I could...
-- Ben/Narrator ("No More Than a Bubble")

Importance: In this passage of "No More Than a Bubble" the first person narrator Ben, discusses the devolution of his parents' relationship, and the effect of his mother's departure on his father and on himself. When Ben's father describes his mother as a sort of infection or sickness, Ben adopts his father's perspective, attaching his father's feelings to his own. This reaction is...