Slaughterhouse Five is an interesting book. I think that Billy Pilgrim is the best example so far of a character blending fact and fiction. Billy is either crazy or he is suffering from PTSD. After the war, I don’t think that he is able to face reality. He already seemed to have a hard time to facing reality before the war. He was timid and had a hard time taking care of himself. His father pushed him into the deep end of the swimming pool and Billy almost drowned until he was saved by someone else. Any hope Billy had to become more confident and any interests he may have had disappeared with the war. He was a young innocent boy that was forced to go “fight” a war. And Billy seemed to really have no idea what he was even fighting for. Vonnegut uses Billy as a stereotype to illuminate the reality for many of the boys sent off to war. Billy not only doesn’t want to be there but he shouldn’t be. So he “time-travels”. Billy escapes his reality by going to another point in his life. He believes in the Tralfamadorian idea that a person is always living another part of their life. So even when a person dies they are living in another time. This doesn’t really make sense to me. Does that mean that even before a person is born they are living already? But I think this is Vonnegut’s purpose. He doesn’t want this to make sense. He doesn’t want someone to escape their problems by ignoring them. In the end Vonnegut’s message reminds me of the quote Montana has on her necklace and what Billy has on his wall in his office. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference”. Vonnegut wants people to realize that although there will always be parts of your life that you cannot change, you should change the parts you have control over. And in the end, the only thing you have control over is your actions.

I think that all of the main characters in Beloved
struggle with facing reality. So they create their own realities. And then they
live in those illusions.

Denver grows up isolated from the world around her so she
seems to think that everything outside of the walls of 124 is evil or will some
way bring her harm. She has lived vicariously from her mother’s stories, which
seem to be the main cause of her fear. So I instead of facing her fears she
draws away from society which is not good for anyone, especially a child.
Denver is so desperate for a friend that she starts to play with the
"ghost" of her dead sister. This leads me to believe that the ghost
is not really real but she is in Denver and Sethe's mind. Both women get so
drawn into the house that they blur reality and fiction in their lives in that
house. I think Denver believes in the ghost because she doesn't know anything
any different and has a need and desire for a friend. And then when Beloved
comes she is finally able to put an idea with something tangible. Denver then
develops an obsessive and unhealthy relationship for this girl. I also don't
think that Beloved is actually Denver's dead sister reincarnated. I think that
without knowing it Sethe and Denver made her into the dead baby because in
their skewed reality Beloved was still alive.

And this is where the illusion starts to crumble. Sethe
and Denver actually mix reality with fiction which illuminates the flaws of
their illusion. If Beloved was actually the dead baby their illusion wouldn't
have changed. But it did change. The arrival of Beloved forced Denver to go out
in the world which allowed her to actually see reality for the way it is.
Beloved also forced Sethe to face her past. Sethe had allowed herself to live
in memories of the past of her choosing. But once Beloved showed up she started
remembering both the good and the bad and with outside help it would have
ruined her. Paul D was her outside help along with Denver. He encouraged Sethe
to live for tomorrow instead of reliving the past. And he reminded her that she
was her own best thing. Paul D was living in his own distorted reality but with
Sethe he realized that he needed to start living reality again too. And
together they will ‘set their stories next to each other” and will start living
reality again.

Meursault does not live in an illusion. He does not hide behind a mask nor does he try to be someone that he is not. And that may be the strangest part about The Stranger.

During class discussions, we talked about how we admired Meursault’s honesty. He said what he was thinking even when it was not the answer that other people were looking for. I never really considered my Big Blog Question in class but now that I do, it is a bit of a surprise for me. There has not been one character in any book that we have read so far that has no created some sort of illusion for himself. Meursault seems to be the exception, not the rule.

All of the other characters, and people I have observed in real life, seem to create an illusion to protect themselves from something, whether it be some other person or some sort of disappointment. People tend to put on a mask to please others or to fit in. I think that is why we find Meursault so peculiar. He does not put on a mask and is very honest to himself and everyone he meets.

Yet he is punished for it. His trial of the murder of the Arab turns into judging his “soul” and personality. No one understands why he did not cry at his mother’s funeral. They seem to think that he is emotionless. When he does not defend himself by “putting on a mask” and responding the way people want him to, he is condemned. When it is so easy for people to convict Meursault for this, it makes me realize how common it is to create an illusion. Not all illusions are huge, but it is unusual for people to give up information about themselves when it will hurt their reputation. It is lying, in a way, but most people see this as harmless.

Meursault has made me realize that the norm is people create illusions. It is part of the culture that we live in and have lived in for a long time.

An extraordinary man or woman is an illusion. It does not exist. No one is perfect. Part of being human means that you have flaws. Raskolnikov seems to forget this when he writes his essay on an extraordinary person.

I think that one of the reasons Raskolnikov commits the murders is because he creates an illusion for himself. He convinces himself that he is like Napoleon and should have divine right. He comes to believe that his ideas are more important than others and that he is above the law. I am not sure if an illusion to this degree qualifies him as mentally insane or not, but he did act on this on his illusion. Either way he seems to want to escape his reality. And in Russia in the 1800s that is almost understandable.

From time to time everyone creates their own illusions to escape. But I think illusions go too far when one acts on them. Marmeladov creates an illusion for himself daily so he can escape his home life. He is not very good at it so he drinks away the rest of his emotions. There is also an illusion around Sonia. Her family creates one by turning a blind eye to her prostitution because it is bringing in money. Both of these qualify as acting on an illusion, and like Raskolnikov, it doesn't help anyone, it just makes the situation worse.

Like in Lear, Raskolnikov's mother creates an illusion about her children. She doesn't really ask any questions about Raskolnikov at the end because she doesn't want to know the truth. I can't decide if she creates the illusion of the perfect son because she is protecting herself or protecting Raskolnikov because she doesn't want him to worry about her. I think it may be a little bit of both.

In most of the novels/plays we have read this semester family dynamics has really come into play for reality vs. illusion. I wonder if it will be the same with next semesters as well.

In King Lear, Lear’s tragic flaw is pride, which leads to his destructive downfall. I think that Lear was so proud that he created an illusion for himself, with the help others, because he subconsciously knew that he might not want to know the real answer.
In the beginning of the play Lear decides to divide up his kingdom based on how much each of his daughters loves him. “Tell me, my daughters -…which of you shall we say doth love us most, that we our nature doth with merit challenge” (Act I, Scene 1, Lines 52-57). Typically people who ask others how much they love them are insecure and need some sort of validation. Lear believes both of his older daughters because they give him the answer he is looking for. But when Cordelia says nothing it shocks Lear and he loses it. He is very reactive. If he wasn’t living an illusion he would have realized that her answer was very honest and that his older daughters were just really playing him.
But Lear doesn’t and everything starts to crumble because of it. In Lear’s case instead of the illusion being a better “reality” to live in, it actually just makes him miserable. The storm in Act III is the breaking point. He becomes mad. I think this is where his illusion and reality clash and it overwhelms him. To deal with it, he becomes mad because he has to find the truth between the two.
Lear does come back to reality at the end of the play but he still suffers the consequences of his illusion. He was blinded by his illusion and it kept him from learning who truly loved him. By the time he did find out it was too late.
Gloucester also lives an illusion, but he did not create it. Edmund creates it for him and Gloucester was naïve enough to believe it. And in the end that illusion also tears his family apart.
After reading King Lear, I wonder if most illusions are created either by family members or as a result of what family does. Is there any patterns in other novels or in real life studies?

At first when I started thinking about how Oedipus Rex connected to my blog questions I thought it might be difficult to connect them. Oedipus does not create his own illusion. Then I realized that Oedipus was living an illusion that was not created by him. It was created by Fate.

This opens up a whole new side to my questions that I never thought about before. Oedipus doesn’t know that he killed his father and married his mother, at the beginning of this play. So in a way he is living in a skewed reality and he is not aware of this. When he discovers that he did commit those crimes he becomes a different man. He struggles to deal with the facts, or reality. There was a consequence for him when his world shifted from illusion to reality.

I like the idea that maybe Fate creates our illusions. Do we have control over what illusions we live? Teiresias says to Oedipus, “Bear your own fate, and I’ll bear mine. It is better so: trust what I say” (Lines 308-309). His advice is to keep living his illusion because it is better for Oedipus. Maybe it is better to not know whether you are living an illusion. Teiresias also says, “You mock my blindness, do you? But I say that you, with both your eyes, are blind: you can not see the wretchedness of your life…” (Lines 399-400). This also makes me wonder if a “dream world” is better to live in than reality.

This was my favorite image I found of Oedipus because it is a mask. A mask is a symbol that is used a lot to illustrate that there is depth to a character and maybe there is something they are trying to hide. The bandages over where the eyes would be and the blood were really powerful. The face behind the mask (reality) still affects the mask (the illusion). The blood is on the mask now, forever ruining the mask and that illusion. (Photo Credit - http://aplitandcomp.wikidot.com/oedipus-rex)

Big Blog Question

"There is no

Life I know

To compare with

Pure imagination

Living there

You'll be free

If you truly wish to be"

-"Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka and

the Chocolate Factory

Everyone always told me that when I "grow up" I'm going to lose my imagination. They said that little kids always grow out of "make believe". Children will stop living in a world of "Pure Imagination".

At first I believed them. I lost interest in creating new places in my head and making up characters. I also watched my little sister "grow up' and noticed when she stopped asking me to play with her. I just sort of accepted this idea. After all that's what all the adults said. But the more I look around at the world and the people in it, this "fact" makes me want to laugh.

Teenagers and adults have not lost their imaginations. They just don't recognize how they are using it.

Sometimes we just can't handle the truth. We would rather put on a mask to hide our own personalities just to be included with the crowd. This leads me to wonder how far someone will go to skew reality and to create an illusion. Is it in human nature to do this as a way of protecting ourselves or is it something we create to satisfy our own personal desires?

Briony, a character from Atonement, took her illusions so far that she changed the lives of her sister and her sister's boyfriend forever. She let her imagination create a story and then used it to try to fix her mistakes. That also makes me question whether or not our illusions have consequences.

In Shakespeare's Othello, the villain Iago says "I am not what I am". I think we are all hiding something. We may show certain people certain parts of our lives but I don't think we ever reveal all our cards to anyone. We seem to take pieces of our own realities and then use our imaginations to fill in the rest. Do we even know the difference between the two anymore?