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?