Awakening to Freedom Awakening or to awake means "to wake up; to be or make alert or watchful" Webster 23. This is what Edna Pontellier experienced in The Awakening. There has been some discussion over the appropriateness of the ending to this story. Was it appropriate for Edna to commit suicide? Yes, this story of Edna Pontellier, including the ending, is appropriate to what a woman probably would have felt like if she were in that time feeling what Edna was feeling. Edna committed suicide because there was no other way out. She did not fit into society. Her thoughts...
have anyone to love her for who she was. She didn't have anyone to talk to about it that would understand. The only way out was to go back to the sea, the only place she felt she belonged. "The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation" 547. As she stood looking out over the sea "she felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known" 625.