Response to Aimee Bender's "Off"

In her short story “Off,” Aimee Bender infuses her character with a slightly off-kilter persona in order to reveal the nature of conformity and how it shapes culture and relationships. This examination is done by making the narrator decidedly non-conformist: she wears a slinky cocktail dress when she knows the party is informal; her goal for the night is to kiss three men, a redhead, a blonde, and a man with black hair; she steals coats; and she paints weird things into her paintings to get a reaction from people. All of these decisions set the narrator apart from the group of conformists she is surrounded with. The people at the party are the kind of people who like to keep up with Joneses. They all buy the same things, such as wineglasses, because everyone “within a ten-block radius had bought [them] because at some inexplicable point in time, everybody woke up with identical taste” (Bender 107). However, the narrator refuses to be this kind of person. She would rather be superior to everyone else than conform to their ideals of normality.

However, it is not just her friends’ ideas of normality that the narrator breaks. She also breaks ideas of what most readers would consider normal. The fact that she paints odd, out of place objects into her landscapes makes one wonder what exactly is wrong with the woman. Most people in society wouldn’t consider that normal. In fact, they would most likely agree with Adam and tell her “Lady, you are screwed UP” if presented with the chance (Bender 116). Similarly, the fact that the narrator feels compelled to steal the coats and hide them from the partygoers is also something that a reader would raise an eyebrow at. Not only is it not normal, but it also seems to portray the narrator as immature; she acts like an adolescent rather than an adult.

However, though the narrator is slightly “off” by most people’s standards, the reader sympathizes with her rather than the “normal” partygoers. Bender describes the party people in a way that makes them seem like automatons. They have no distinct personalities; they are all the same cookie cutter shape. The fact that Bender doesn’t include names, with the exception of Adam, but rather relies on physical descriptions reveals the fact that, to the narrator, no one is distinctive – all live in the realm of conformity.