When Dana finally returns home with Kevin, he complains, “If I’m not home yet, maybe I don’t have a home” (pg. 190). Kevin has been living in the antebellum south for five years but has only lived in his apartment in 1976 for two days. He has trouble finding things in the kitchen and finds himself tinkering with the stove. Surprised, Dana considers this strange viewpoint and realizes herself that she is more familiar with Rufus’s time than with her own. She comments, “I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time. Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger reality” (pg. 191).
In all of the books which we have read so far, we are presented with different realities. We spend numerous classes attempting to dissect which reality is more ‘real’. In Cat’s Cradle the Bokononists participated in a ‘play’ that was scripted by Bokonon and Earl McCabe in order to provide the islanders with an escape from their miserable lives. While initially we may dismiss Bokononism as a fake religion, we begin to realize that it is real for so many characters. Bokononists realize that their lives are a ‘fiction’ of sorts, but they embrace it nonetheless in order to provide themselves with happiness. For example Bokononism is ‘outlawed’ yet everyone still practices it. In fact, the only reason it is outlawed is so that Bokononists will more readily embrace it.
In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried he constantly blurs the line between reality and fiction until the reader no longer knows which one he is reading. By inserting himself as the narrator he forces the reader to question the veracity, or falsity, of the stories he is writing. From there the reader must decide whether the veracity of the story is important.
In Dick’s The Man In The High Castle we are presented with two different realities. We read the book through one reality only to discover towards the end, through Tagomi and Juliana, that another reality exists. Immediately Juliana embraces this new reality and completely disregards her former life but the Abendsen’s aren’t nearly as willing to do the same. To them the previous reality that held truth for them, the one they lived their entire lives in, is more real. Juliana disagrees, however.
Initially while reading Kindred we believe that the 1976 reality is more ‘real’ than Rufus’s. We refuse to accept that perhaps Dana’s life is more rooted in the antebellum south than in 1976. While the book progresses, however, we realize that although she was afraid of adapting to the days of slavery, she does so anyway in order to survive. She becomes conditioned by the culture, as does Kevin. Their home feels foreign to them and Dana actually views the Weylin’s house as ‘home’. Butler describes Dana’s life and relations with others in more detail while Dana is in the antebellum south which presents this reality in a more ‘truthful’ and relatable way. Through doing so we recognize that perhaps the antebellum south is a ‘truer’ reality than that of 1976.
I really enjoy the idea that most of these novel's are centered around realities and their "truth" to the characters they pertain to. The realization of which reality is real becomes completely skewed to the point that the characters second guess every aspect of their lives. Is this true, is that true; they most likely could not tell up from down if you asked them. When it comes down to it there is nothing real about any of these realities.
ReplyDeleteNot only are the characters left to question every detail of their reality but we, the readers, are as well. Vonnegut is not the only author we have read who has completely distorted our view on reality. He wrote that nothing in his book is true in order to detach us from any grounding perspective we might have been holding on to. The Day The World Ended was the only guide which led us through the novel and kept us with some feeling of familiarity. Without subconsciously following the details which led to this novel, the reader would've felt even more lost and would not have been able to follow the events in Cat's Cradle. In Dick's novel he presents us with the i Ching, which serves as a grounding point to help us read the book. As much as the novel twists and turns, it is still centered around the i Ching. In Butler's novel she provides us with the cut-off arm, as we talked about in class, that leads us from the beginning of the novel to the end while reality flips everything else upside down over and over again.
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