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Reflection

The Relationship of the Mind and Body in Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

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In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami explores the concept of the mind and its relationship with the body, arguing that they are ultimately disconnected, and one can never know their own mind. Murakami presents two parallel universes, one in Tokyo, which often uses past tense, where the narrator is a Calcutech scrambling data using his own mind and the other in the End of the World, which is set in present tense,  where the narrator  is a dreamreader that reads the minds of the Town’s inhabitants.

These two parallel universes are placed side by side throughout the novel rather than having one and then the other to show that they are parallel universes that both exist at once. The Town represents the narrator’s subconscious, and hardboiled wonderland is his reality, but after being experimented upon, he slips into his own subconscious. Murakami demonstrates the skewed temporality of the two worlds when the chubby girl says to the narrator, “your memory is running backward,” which symbolizes that although the End of the World is the world to which the narrator is heading in twenty four hours, he has in a way already experienced the End of the World and remembers the future. This concept of parallel memory tracks highlights Murakami’s argument that the mind and body are disconnected because the narrator’s mind has traveled to places his body has not; it has a reality of its own.

The same idea of the mind and body being disconnected is present when the professor tells the narrator that the world itself will not end, but that the world as the narrator knows it will end; the narrator will enter his subconscious which has always been running in the background unbeknownst to him. It is clear that the End of the World has existed as a parallel reality or as the narrator’s subconscious since the beginning of the novel since the narrator experiences small memories of the other world, and the link between the worlds is the unicorn skull, which symbolizes the minds of the people in the Town.

Just like the people in the Town are mindless because they have been separated from their shadows, the narrator experiences the mind-body disconnect when his shadow jumps through the whirlpool and leaves him in his subconscious. The narrator has left reality and entered his subconscious, never to return. Instead, he exists in the Town, where he will have recollections of the past and the hardboiled wonderland world but will not feel their full force since his mind has left him.

Murakami’s cyperpunk novel uses the fragmentation of the narrator’s mind to comment on the unbridgeable gap between our reality and our subconscious, our body and our mind, and what we have know that we are on Earth and what might lie in wait for us after we have passed on.

– Lauren Hodgson

Reflection

The Theme of Oppression in “The Cure” by Ginu Kamani

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In “The Cure,” Ginu Kamani uses Baby’s height and persistent growth to mirror instances in which Baby loses control over her life and other people restrict her ability to choose her own path. Baby’s growth is out of her control and something that her body chooses for her in the same way that her mother, Dr. Doctor,  and Ramdass make choices for her and try to control her fate. Modern medicine also comes into the discussion about Baby’s height as the common view is that “these days doctors have a cure for everything.” Baby’s mother entrusts Baby’s fate in the hands of Dr. Doctor, a sexologist, and allows him to sexually abuse her under the guise of knowing how to cure her as a doctor. Baby’s mother begs him to “find a cure, that’s all I ask,” showing her blind faith in a stranger just because of his title. Baby’s height serves as a representation of how modern medicine can be used to oppress women and young girls and to implement traditional conservative views of what a lady should be like. Baby’s mother herself is given tranquilizers to control her mood swings, and she can be seen also as a victim of social pressures in how she is lead to trust blindly in medicine and titles. Baby begins to take control over her life when she extracts her female fluids on her own out of rebellion against the doctor. At the end of the story, she recognizes that her growth as her becoming greater and more powerful than her mother, the doctor, and Ramdass who all have made choices on her behalf and she declares that she is “bigger than all of [them].” Baby states that her body will no longer grow. Although Kamani does not indicate whether or not Baby gains greater control over her life or if she is not forced into marriage and it is unclear whether Baby really stops growing, Baby’s outburst represents a pivotal part of the story in which baby takes control over her fate and rebels against their control over her life. Whereas before she could not control her own life nor her growth, here she declares that she will stop her growth, representing that she will control her life.

– Lauren Hodgson

Uncategorized

Pharmacology in the 20th C

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Medical advances were abundant during the 20th century, with major breakthroughs in technology, chemistry, biology, and pharmacology that overlapped to eradicate many diseases. Over the course of the 20th century, drugs to treat illness such as aspirin, the arsenic-based compound Salvarsin to treat syphilis, antibioitcs such as penicillin, steroid hormones such as cortisone were discovered and found to be effective in treating a multitude of fatal and nonfatal illnesses. In addition, the first antiviral vaccines were discovered, including smallpox and polio. These advances lead to drastic improvement in collective health and life expectancy, and fatal diseases like pneumonia and tuberculosis that lead to roughly one-third of all deaths in 1900 are rare in the US now. While some drugs had basis in natural techniques that had been around for centuries, the 20th century also saw the rise of synthesizing new, unnatural drugs often by the process of computer-aided design (CAD).

In response to the multitude of drugs being tested and put unto place came regulation of drugs by government agencies. Over time, drug laws and regulatory agencies have expanded, sometimes in response to health crises caused by the release of a drug. Drugs are now analyzed in their performance in clinical trials, in terms of their risk-to-benefit ratios, mutagenicity, teratogenicity (cancer-causing) and other factors. The climate of medical change accompanied by major advances in science and technology had large implications on culture and society.

– Lauren Hodgson

Sources:

http://www.planetseed.com/relatedarticle/20th-century-and-drugs-treat-sicknesses

http://www.pharmsci.uci.edu/history.php

http://www.britannica.com/topic/pharmaceutical-industry/Drug-discovery-and-development

Argument

“The End of Something” as a Modernist Work

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Hemingway’s “The End of Something” can be read as a romanticization of the past and a tale of how the present will never live up to the past, but the story is Modernist in that Hemingway cements the story in the present and diverts the reader’s expectations of a normal story line. While a story normally has a beginning, middle, and end and insight into the thoughts of the main character, “The End of Something” starts when Nick has already decided to break up With Marjorie as shown when he speaks to his friend Bill after she leaves and there is no obvious depiction of Nick’s thoughts. While this is what appears to be happening on the surface, Hemingway has a deeper meaning in store for his readers. The odd structure of the narration actually presents Nick’s thoughts, and the odd presentation of beginning, middle, and end, serves to provide a deeper meaning for the story. “The End of Something” is a Modernist piece in its peculiar narrative style, diversion of readers’ expectations, and capturing of thought.

– Lauren H

Reflection

“The Dead”-A Commentary on War

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WWI was unprecedented in its length and horrific character as thousands of soldiers died. Rupert Brooke takes an angle of humanizing the soldiers that can be contrasted by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which talks more generally of the role and fate of the solider.

While “The Dead” is short, the lines are long and each word provides meaning and tone. The poem does not seem to be referring to soldiers as soldiers but as human beings in what they have experienced and the beauty of life, which is contrasted by death. The first stanza uses romantic lines such as “dawn was theirs” and “felt the quick stir of wonder” and ends with the final words, in a curt 4 word sentence: “All this is ended.” While the rest of the lines of the first stanza flow together and are punctuated by commas, this last statement stands out clearly to show what has been lost. It is of interest that the first stanza does not focus on only the beautiful things in life but also the very human, vulnerable aspects of a full life, as Brooke says, the lost beings were “washed marvelously with sorrow,” demonstrating that life’s sweetness comes from sorrow and joy.

The second stanza moves away from the soldiers and personifies “Frost” as a being that “stays the waves that dance,” which is sort of a bringer of death. Brooke does not describe the death cruelly but rather cold and honourable, shown by the “Frost” leaving “a shining peace, under the night.”  Brooke plies at the emotions of the reader, humanizes the soldier as a being who experienced all that life has to offer but was put out like a flame by a cold but honourable death.

 

-Lauren