In this essay, I explore the powerful endings of the two short stories Inventory and Eight Bites from Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado. The whole book collection is unexpected and has very interesting narratives that leave you thinking, making you guess what the ending of the story was or what the actual meaning is. The stories Inventory and Eight Bites stand out the most to me for how their conclusions reveal very deep emotional and personal themes. In the story Inventory, the main character reflects on her past relationships while she is alone during the pandemic, which emphasizes her loneliness and shows her self-reflection. Her telling the inventory about her love life shows how she lacks love and self-worth. The ending of Inventory kind of represents a moment of independence and self-discovery for the character and emphasizes what she’s actually worth and how having an inventory of people might have made her lose herself along the way. Meanwhile, Eight Bites deals with a woman that undergoes surgery for her body and loses weight, influenced by society, family, and her mother. Once she undergoes surgery, she is faced with disconnection from her body and starts to see a ghost, and that ghost has a representative value—it represents her emotional trauma and identity loss. Both stories and their endings highlight major themes, which include independence, bodily transformation, and the journey of self-discovery. All of these themes and their conclusions are important to understand the characters’ internal battles and reflect the pressures they face from the world around them.

Title of : The endings of “Inventory and Eight bites Her Body and Other Parties

In class, we have spent a few weeks discussing Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria
Machado. This book is a collection of short stories that can be unexpected, confusing, and leave
you pondering what will happen at the end. It makes you analyze the story carefully, which is
what makes it so interesting. In this case, the endings of the stories reveal themes where the
characters struggle with their bodies, desires, and even face pressure from society. In this essay,
you might expect me to ramble about the stories, but no—I’ll focus on two important endings
that stood out to me: the endings of Inventory and Eight Bites. I will explain these endings and
their significance, as they reveal key themes in the book, such as independence, self-discovery,
and the emotional impact of bodily transformation. The importance of these endings lies in how
they affect the characters and the overall narrative.

First, we start with Inventory, and it starts with a woman making an inventory about her
relationships and how they impacted her so deeply. Throughout the story, she is running from a
pandemic virus that rapidly expands. In the story, this is used as a metaphor. As she moves to get
away from the virus, her relationships, I feel like, start to get a little more crazy and extreme. For
example, the time when she was almost killed, woke up to a knife in her throat, and had to send
the guy away. After that, she mainly became more interested in women than men. The same
happens when she splits up with her wife and sleeps with men more than women. As worse
events happen, her relationships also get worse. The main moment that she breaks is after her
split with her wife, which again, she breaks and becomes more interested in men. I feel like this
is a pattern she is used to and is not able to be alone by herself. If she is by herself, she would
probably get this feeling of being alone, which is not what she wants. She lacks a lot of self-love
and respect for herself because this feeling of loneliness makes her feel empty.

Now we have talked about what happens throughout the story, now we can talk about the ending.
In the end, the virus, also called a pandemic, makes the setting of the story become empty after
she runs away from the virus to an island in the middle of the ocean, where you feel that she is
completely alone. She starts to reflect on her past relationships and sexual relationships as well.
It is kind of the moment in which we, as humans, reflect on our past and see what we have done
and what we could have done differently. This is her moment, this is her inventory, and this
inventory was done by, like I mentioned, her to feel this sense of loneliness. This moment
supports themes like independence and self-discovery. Now she is alone and independent once
again, she is able to self-discover herself. And how is she able to do that? Because she is sitting,
reflecting, and doing this inventory about her life.

Now we have Eight Bites, and this story starts off with her in surgery, awaiting a surgery that we
don’t yet know what it is about, and then we are hit with a throwback. In the back of January, she
describes her life and her past life, where she has three sisters, a daughter, and her mom
mentioned. She describes her sisters always being there for her, even after her surgery, which
shows a support system but also kind of the influence of why she gets this surgery later on. She
later on reflects on her mother, and she talks about the phrase “eight bites.” She states this idea
that you only have to take eight bites of food. Her mother, according to her, looked skinny and
was never overweight. This causes her to become more aware of what she eats and even causes
her to feel anxiety after eating, which leads her to take more than eight bites due to the fact that
she is hungry. She then experiences even more anxiety after picturing the food as delicious and
in her mouth. Even if she remembers herself as having a normal weight and being a normal
teenager, this is something that sticks with her every single day. When she remembers her mom,
this constant phrase that her mother said sticks with her, and now that she is older, she could feel
it more and ask questions like, “What would my mother think or say?” Her mother influenced
her, I believe, to be skinny and eat less. This led her to have more trauma and even to feel not
comfortable with her body. Despite this, she talks about society and how her body could not be
up to her standards.

Then we have her daughter, and the daughter is described in the story as not being as close to her.
Her daughter is really against this surgery due to the fact that it can change her mom’s body
while making her look more skinny. She goes through the surgery, and all of her sisters are there,
and her daughter again is the one who is against this. Her daughter talks about how her mother
might hate her body now because it’s the same shape as her mother’s body before. And I feel like
this is when she has this moment where the ghost appears, meaning her old body appears and
haunts her. She is not happy with this body, and she got this body due to the influence others had
on her—her mom, society, and her sisters, who all got the surgery, influenced this act, and now
her old self haunts her. She describes that the ghost always follows her, and at the end, the most
important part is when she describes the ghost as being herself and has this moment of
self-discovery and the emotional impact of bodily transformation. She states that her old self will
outgrow her and that she never deserved her body. This is self-discovery—realizing that she
never loved her new body but, due to the influence of society, she now is not herself.

Now we see that both endings reveal the characters’ struggles and themes to control their
bodies—independence, self-discovery, and the emotional impact of bodily transformation—and
how they are more impactful at the ending. In Inventory, she reflects on her past relationships
and sexual relationships as well when she felt this sense of loneliness and reflection, where she
created an inventory causing her to self-reflect due to independence, which is a main theme in
this story but also in other stories in Carmen Maria Machado’s collection. While Eight Bites
could be a different story, it has the same themes like independence, self-discovery, and the
emotional impact of bodily transformation, where the main character is faced with an eating
disorder and struggles with her bodily transformation in a negative way. She does not feel happy
with her new body, and at the end, she has this moment of self-discovery and the emotional
impact of bodily transformation, where she states that she did not deserve her old body and that it
will outgrow her.

The endings of Inventory and Eight Bites are important and are key to understanding the
collection’s larger themes of independence, self-discovery, and the emotional impact of bodily
transformation. Both stories challenge the idea that physical changes can solve deeper emotional
issues, underscoring the complexity of navigating one’s identity in a world filled with the
challenges that society and family can bring and cause these struggles.

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