“The Great Wave” by S.J. Rozan is an interesting read because of the choice to make it an interior piece, which reinforces the isolation of the main character who has found herself stuck in a situation she never thought she would experience and had a very hard time coping with.
I thought it was an interesting choice to introduce the relationship with her captor as almost a game, an ‘inappropriate’ thrill, because it plays on the fact that when your younger and in a new relationship, there are things you don’t notice or don’t know exist within the space of a relationship.
I also saw in these two a parallel of obsession, the man does not wish to give our main character up, and she refuses to destroy the glass frame of the Great Wave even if it would cost her the means of her freedom. The difference is that our antagonist, this captor who refuses to let her leave, locks her away, and our protagonist takes great measures to ensure the painting it removed from her. Perhaps because she doesn’t want it to be taken from her should she fail, and by removing the painting herself, gives her a sense of control she sorely lacks, or perhaps because this odd fantasy and conversation she has had with the painting and it’s occupants leave her with a feeling of not wanting the end of her journey to be witnessed by something she holds so dearly.
In many ways this story reads to me as how loving something too much can become suffocating, to ourselves and others. The antagonist traps our main character out of what he likely perceives to be love, and our reality of him is painted initially by our main characters love for him, and then later the misery of a captured soul going through the motions to survive. Our protagonist drowns herself, ending a long miserable existence on a strange note of reclaiming her choice in a very extreme way, denying herself the opportunity to escape alive out of love for the Great Wave. She cut her lifeline from her, and she drowned without it, even by choice.