The Star My Destination

The Star My Destination

Alfred Bester

1956

I would like to state first of all that, out of all the stories I have read this semester so far The Star My Destination was the most frustrating thus far. The main character Gully Foyle was too frustrating of a character to get pass his first developing stages of the novel. Everything about him just screams pain in the ass. He is not very caring or outgoing. He doesn't really have any good lifelong goals. He is lazy, dumb, sluggish, unmotivated, and is just literally the biggest jackass I had ever read up to this point. The description of him is: "Too easy to for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love." My first though when reading this was "Jesus, how could this be our hero?" I felt like I was reading the description of some of my friends back in high school.

Okay It's guest me being impatient with his character which I think I was. I figure that I read this novel at a bad time and just didn't have the patience nor the will power to keep up with it. After reading the introduction of our 'hero' and the situation that he is in. The story is set in the future and our 'hero is currently stranded out in a wrecked spaceship for about 170 days. Now a normal person would think, I gosh, he must be trying everything to escape that hellhole. Nope, the expression I got from it was this was that Gully was simple waiting for someone to just simply rescue him.

This suspicion did not help do to the fact that when the ship, the Vorga, was passing by him and he sent out a distress to the ship, which completely ignored him. This scene basically was start of our 'hero's' motivation to go on this journey and kill everyone that was apart of that ship. This situation gives him the real motivation for the first time in is life to live: Revenge.

At this point of the story I feel like it is too early to just walk away from. I mean I wasn't even two-thrids into the story. So I continued, After awhile, Gully eventually fixes the ship best to his abilities and floats  off until he is picked up by a these human that lives in the planetary asteriod belt between Mars and Jupiter. Gully while there is given a wife. Wait, what? He is given a wife? This came out of the blue for me and this get seems very, very sexist. Not only is he given a wife but he doesn't really take care of her.  Nor does he care about the live around him as he blasted off in the space yacht. At this point of the story just could not take anymore and had to put the book down. I feel that I need to one day finish reading this cause I felt like it caught me in the wrong mood to read it.