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(2016
midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2016 (Index) Essay 1: Compare, contrast, and evaluate Narratives of the Future |
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Rebecca Dyda
3/15/2016
Discovering the truth
As we
grow as human beings, we feel almost as though we are obligated to find some
kind of meaning to our lives. Many of us go out and try to find this truth,
while others just decide that their depiction of the truth is correct and they
never seem to question it. Growing up as a believer in the faith of god, it
became harder for me as I got older to keep up with this faith because of the
various contradictions I found. I am currently in search of the truth myself,
and this same subject of discovering truth is brought up time and time again in
our readings. Many of these texts seem to have a common need of discovering the
truth all while depicting the apocalyptic, Evolution, and alternative themes.
Ultimately our lives are a big search for the truth or what we believe to be the
truth, and our literature seems to reflect this as well.
In
our lives we find that there are some discovered truths that can stand the
passage of time. The first texts that have discovered their own truth which has
carried on for centuries is Revelation
and Genesis. Our scriptural texts are
considered to be apocalyptic narratives because they have a beginning, middle,
and an end, and they portray that they have found a “revealed truth” or
“revelation”. In the book of Genesis,
or the creation part of the text, the beginning of human kind is depicted; the
text goes into detail about how god created the earth, and humans. Furthermore,
Genesis is considered to be the
beginning of the era of mankind, or so it claims.
Next
we go into Revelations which is
considered to be the apocalypse part text. In revelations you have a full
explanation of the specific obstacles that human kind will go through (the
middle) on their way to judgement day. This universally known “judgement day” is
the day where all of human kind will cease to exist and their spirits will go
off to heaven or hell for all eternity (the end). In conclusion of the
creation/apocalypse story found in the bible, we find the inevitable truth of
the text. This truth seems to be that God is the alpha omega, he is the creator
of us, and he will ultimately decide when we will be destroyed. He is the reason
why we live, and he is who we will spend our lives living for.
Even
though in apocalyptic literature you get a definite beginning, middle, and end,
in evolutionary literature this is not the case. Evolutionary novels are a
process of gradual change occurring in a system, institution, subject, artefact,
product, etc., from a simpler to a more complex or advanced state. These types
of novels do not have a definite ending, for they are to keep progressing and
changing far after the novel is complete. Two of our texts that follow this
theme is The Time Machine and
Parable of the Sower. In H.G Wells
The Time Machine Evolution is seen by
the change of current day humans into the Eloi and Morlocks. In this text the
world is completely different, and human beings have adapted to the new
conditions of the world. Towards the end of the novel, the time traveler travels
far into time, finding that again the world has changed and that no form of
humans exist and that the only living creatures left are scary crab-like
creatures. This text, gives us a possible outcome of our future, similar to the
one depicted in the creation/apocalypse story in our scriptural texts. Like the
ending described in our scriptural texts, the time traveler has come to a time
where human kind is completely wiped out, and we are left with a world almost
unbearable to live in. In the midst of this evolution described by the text,
there is also a discovered truth. The truth discovered by the time traveler and
the readers of the time machine, is that our mark on this world is so small. We
are a species that eventually shall pass; however, nature after it all will
continue.
The
next text that follows this theme while also discovering its own form of truth
was Parable of the Sower. This novel
is an evolutionary novel because Lauren’s life, and the novel, gradually changes
from the comfort of her gated society to Lauren and various other community
members learning how to survive in the chaos outside her community. Even though
Parable has a much different back story than the scriptural texts, the two texts
do have a hidden parallel. This Parallel being that Parable seems to fill in the
void created by the “end” of this apocalyptic narrative.
For
example, in our scriptural texts, you are given a series of stories such as the
creation of the planets, humans, the story of the Garden of Eden, and the
depiction of judgement day. Not only do these stories depict the beginning,
middle, and end of the human race, but the stories leave holes that can be
filled in by evolutionary texts. For instance in the story of the Garden of
Eden, God made both Adam and Eve and allowed them into the Garden of Eden. This
is with the condition that they must not eat from the tree of knowledge. In the
middle, the pair do not listen to god and instead listen to the serpent and eat
off of the tree of knowledge. The story ends where Adam and Eve are kicked out
of the Garden of Eden and are to never return. This hole gives the opportunity
to create plenty of possible endings to what actually happened to Adam and Eve
after leaving the garden.
This
is where I believe Parable sort of takes on an alternate ending to this original
creation story. Even though
Parable of the Sower doesn’t follow
the same story that the Garden of Eden does, you can definitely see throughout
the novel a parallel to this story. For instance, the gated community that
Lauren lives in seems to resemble that of the Garden of Eden. It resembles the
Garden of Eden because the more that Lauren would learn and find her own truth
and disregard the truth of the bible, the more that this gated community
crumbles apart. Finally, the gated community is taken over, therefore Lauren is
forced out of this “Garden of Eden” and put out to live life on her own, just
like Adam and Eve did. Even though we do not find out what exactly happened to
Adam and Eve, in Parable we see where Lauren survives with the help of other
survivors and creates a community of her own. This brings up the question of
could Adam and Eve have created the same fate as Lauren in Parable? The answer
to this is lost in the passage of time; however, Butler seems to explore this
idea in Parable.
In
the midst of the evolution depicted in Parable of the Sower, Lauren did find her
own truth, this truth was found in the religion of Earthseed. In this religion,
Lauren believes that “god is change” and that there is no man named God, but
that god is in nature, and the change that is around us. Like in our scriptural
texts, the discovered truth in Parable sets the mood for the theme it is
depicting, which in this case is the evolutionary theme. The truth found in
Parable is simply that the world around us is constantly changing, therefore we
change along with the stories we tell.
Even
though apocalyptic and evolutionary themed novels are very similar, in
literature you are going to have some themes that come off as odd. These texts
seem to go beyond what our mind can comprehend, and sort of dip into an unknown
reality. This type of literature, otherwise known under the category of
alternative futures, displays alternate endings, and time travel as a possible
thing. Even though alternative themes aren’t exactly the familiar to us like
apocalyptic and evolutionary texts, they are in some ways a theme that
intertwines them, creating a theme of the unfamiliar. The alternative theme
takes the standard beginning middle and definite end found in apocalyptic
novels, the gradual change found in evolutionary novels, and branches off into a
texts filled with changes and alternate plausible endings. The text that depicts
this theme and finds its own truth is Be
ready at about half past eight. This text falls under the alternative theme
for various reasons, one of the first one’s being the gender transformation of
Zach. This falls under alternative theme because Zach is seeing what his life
would be like if he were a women instead of a man. This can be seen as Zach
taking on an alternate reality other than his own, and seeing how different his
life would be as a different gender. Zach can be seen as finding his own truth
which is an identity separate from the one he is given. Zach is not the only
character who struggles to come to a truth of his own, Zach’s friend Byron also
struggles with his own identity, and wonders what it would be like as the
opposite sex like Zach. Byron seems to be also having a sexual identity crisis,
although Byron takes this discovery a different way than Zach. Zach seems to
embrace his sexuality and start a whole new life for himself, while Byron seems
to put aside his sexual identity crisis, and focus on supporting Zach in his new
found identity.
Both
of these characters create two separate forms of reality for facing what seems
to be the same identity crisis. Both men seem to find some truth in themselves,
ultimately making their own decisions on how to deal with this truth. Like in
our Apocalyptic and Evolutionary themed texts, this texts found truth also sets
the mood for the theme of the novel. In
Better be ready at about half past eight, the characters find their own
sense truth in their lives. This ultimately puts together two completely
different timelines of what could have happened in each case.
In
conclusion I will refer back to Sarah Hurt’s 2015 essay. Sarah states, “The
three narratives are both closely tied together and held apart by a combination
of science and cultural acceptance, and as the majority of what we have read
this semester shows, the definition of these narratives will only become harder
to keep separate as the lines are blurred in regards to how similar they are.” I
think Sarah is spot on. Through our texts we see the same ideas over and over
again, creating the differences of the three texts to become blurred. Because
the differences are blurred we realize that the texts are all told to accomplish
the same thing, to find the untold truth within the text itself.
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