Cycles, Circles, and Wanting What You Can't Have

We have seen the motif of cycles/circles and the perpetual nature of things in all the texts we have read so far. In Cat's Cradle we saw in what the actual cats cradle string represented and the never-ending nature of the game. In The Things They Carried, Bowker drives in circles around the lake when he is home. In both of these scenarios, people are trying to achieve something that has no end goal. A cats cradle can never actually finish without someone messing it up and eventually you are basically going back and forth between two moves, and in Bowker's situation he is circling around to find meaning and bring back his innocence whether its lost from war or his friend drowning in that very lake, in which both are impossible.

Likewise, in Foe there is the idea of endless cycles with the "dark and mean" (Coetzee, 113) stair case that becomes a reoccurring idea when Barton enters a new place. Also there is a deeper cycle in that Susan wants to always be in the place she is not. For example, she essentially put herself on the island, tried to get off of it, got off of it, and then when at Foe's house she states, "I closed my eyes, trying to find my way back to the island"(Coetzee, 139). She always wants to be in a different place then where she actually is. This really reminded me of in Lost where when the characters finally leave "the island," they want and need to go back, and do so many times. It's this entrapping circle of wanting what you don't have and also not fully knowing what you want that is making one trapped. I think that for one, Susan is trapping herself in this endless cycle, but more so Coetzee creates these literally cycles to create meaning, like the God theory we discussed with the staircase potentially leading to heaven. Though I don't fully understand the meaning that Coetzee is trying to portray yet, I think there is significance in the endless cycles that the characters are trapped in and also that we, as readers, are trapped in as well.