Death

So the scene where the neighborhood was burned down was pretty chocking. Most of the people Lauren knew and grew up with died, yet it seems like she hasn't really addressed it. Sure she expressed shock when she first learned Zahra saw her family members dying, yet it seems like there was no grieving or anything for all the people they lost. And this makes sense - it seems like they're a little too preoccupied with not dying to even think about it. But I wonder if she'll ever come to terms with it or think about it - maybe if she finds some place North to settle down? Or is she already so accustomed to death and the people she knows disappearing that it doesn't have that big of an effect on her? I talked about this a little in a previous blogpost - this world must completely change relationships and how people see other people. Nobody's a constant fixture in anybody's life and you can't get attached to anyone for fear of them disappearing. Seeing so much bad stuff happen also makes empathy a lot harder - which makes it particularly interesting that the protagonist of the story can't help but strongly empathize with people. Why do you think Butler chose to write Lauren this way?

Comments

  1. L. MoffittMay 20, 2021 at 9:04 AM

    The empathy thing is clearly important to this novel, but through most of the book, it is mainly a huge liability to Lauren, which is interesting. Butler doesn't sentimentalize empathy -- Lauren never says "OK yeah I suffer but it's important to feel for others." In light of what happens later in the book, I don't know that she ever has this moment, but she does at least understand how to balance over-empathizing and being overly indifferent.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

B.B. & The Internet

      A lot of people have mentioned the similarity between Big Brother and technology today. Although I agree that it seems like companies today have a lot more data than I'd like to admit, and they could probably be capable of tracking people in the same way that Big Brother does, their motivation feels fundamentally different. The spying in 1984, in my opinion, isn't bad just by nature, but because it's used to stifle any dissent - whether in the form of spoken word or even just thought. The worry today is that many companies provide free services in exchange for people's data. As far as I understand this data is used to target people with ads as well as study & profit off of social trends. This seems benevolent - it's used for the companies benefit and has nothing to do with controlling people. They profit off of people's viewing patterns sure but they don't change them.     At the same time, I understand that a lot of people's criticisms with th...
Read more

BNW & 1984

For most of 1984 I thought that the main goal of both societies was stability. Of course they achieved this in different ways - while in Brave New World stability is achieved by keeping people happy, in 1984 it's achieved by keeping everyone under the absolute power of Big Brother. But then we get to read O'Brien's long explanation about the real point of the party and how it was actually just set up to hold onto pure power.  At least that's the gist I got from his spiel - although I don't know if I caught everything O'Brien was saying, most of it seemed to revolve around power and how anyone that says they want power for any other means than just having power is fooling themselves. This marks a pretty big difference between the two books. While Brave New World is a story about a utopia that doesn't work in practice, 1984 is a story about a totalitarian government that went too far to satisfy it's need for power and control. This means the warnings the a...
Read more

Leaving the Neighborhood

I found the family's reaction to Keith leaving the neighborhood pretty interesting.  I think it shows something about the situation that they're in. Lauren's dad did get really mad after Keith left and they tried to look for him and everything, however it just didn't seem like they made as big of a deal about their child disappearing as I would expect, but maybe that's just from the frame of our society. Also the father dying didn't seem like that big of a shock either. That makes a lot of sense, considering there's people constantly dying and disappearing from their neighborhood. It probably kind of infiltrates your life and changes the way you think about people in your life and death. What were Lauren's dad and Cory expecting from their children? Did they want them to just stay in the neighborhood and maybe take over their jobs? Marry, have babies, etc.? Or did they think the world would go back to how it used to be? Or, more probably, were they just ...
Read more