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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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Vicente Garza
Spirals, Lines, and Branches
“History is doomed to repeat itself.”
This rather common phrase tends to set an ominous tone immediately when
spoken or read. But what if one
were to look at it in a different perspective?
What if instead of a doomed future stemming from a dark past, time is
simply a loop? This meaning that it
isn’t some dark and brooding thing, but rather a part of nature?
The tone takes a drastic turn in a different direction.
Time is a concept given flesh through human hands; these same hands that
mold history just the same. As far
back as the Scriptures, and more recently in Parable of the Sower, and Stone
Lives, time plays the role of the web that ties everything together.
In the Scriptures, time is laid out as a preordained series of events
that have passed and will come to pass inevitably.
So as the Lord created the heavens and the Earth in seven days at the
beginning of existence, one day the world will come to an end with the sinners
paying eternally and the righteous ascending to the heavens to live in eternal
glory. It’s a straight path with
many events in between, but a definite line. As a story, it’s a linear narrative
with a creation/apocalypse theme.
Moreover, one could say that the concepts of heaven and hell are
post-apocalyptic, since the “final fate of humanity” lies in one of these two
places. To clarify, mankind will
end up there no matter what at some point, and all of humanity will after the
rapture, so at one point these two settings do in fact become post-apocalyptic!
Parable of the Sower retains the creation/apocalypse theme, but does not
work in the single linear path that the Scriptures do.
Rather than go in a straight line, Parable works in a spiral; it evolves.
Lauren’s actions, which come as a result of her knowledge that an
“apocalypse” event is sure to come, save her life as well as end up helping the
“creation” of a new community at the end of the story.
The events may be a straight line, but the overarching theme of the story
is anything but. The world spirals
and evolves as does Lauren. Where
the country once fell in its own apocalypse, and Lauren’s father helped to
create a new community, that community too ends up falling and Lauren helps to
create a new one. Furthermore,
individuals who join Lauren’s small band throughout the story do not all finish
the story at her side. There is
small whirlpool upon whirlpool within the bigger circle of the story.
It’s a cycle of creation and destruction with the hope that eventually
the destruction will come to an end.
Lauren hopes for more and wants humanity to leave the Earth and begin
again somewhere else on another world, essentially giving her a god-like complex
wherein she would “birth the creation” of humanity on a new world.
Stone Lives touches on the apocalypse/creation aspect as well by
initiating the tale from the point of view of Stone, who is blind and living in
the slums but ends up as the head of the company of his deceased mother.
His mother leaves him to grow up in poverty so that he may be humbled.
This is his personal apocalypse, though to him it’s the every-day norm.
The creation aspect comes in the form of his rebirth with his new eyes,
and the enhancement of his mind.
This is the evolution of his character, as was Lauren’s in Parable.
Apocalypse strikes again at the end of the story when he is attacked and
loses both June and his mother, and is immediately made the head of the company
from which he must “create” a new empire as his mother did before him.
It falls into the theme of progress, because Stone becomes the type of
character that isn’t going to simply sit on his laurels while his new kingdom
burns. That precisely, Stone’s
personal evolution, falls into the theme of progress as well, going from a
street urchin to the new crown prince of the company, as well as into an
intellectual. Though the story
initially appears to be a simple linear tale, one can surmise at the end that if
an attack on his enterprise happened once, it can easily happen again and more
than likely would within that universe, lending again to the evolving story
type.
I can easily comprehend the structure of a spiraling series of events.
Evolution is not a straight line, and though on a chart it may appear as
branches with creatures going off in different directions, it’s actually a
spiral of growth, decline, rebirth and growth again.
These branches can come together again eventually as well.
On the same note, they may not come back together at all.
This is where alternative futures or realities come into play.
These can become a little confusing if you don’t have a vivid
imagination. An alternative reality
may be as simple as a dimension where Gore won the presidency instead of Bush,
or it may be as radically different as it was in Mozart in Mirrorshades, where
the famous musician was instead a punk rocker and in the 1770s no less.
In this tale, people are able to venture into the past, but create
alternate timelines when they do instead of going back in a straight line to a
certain point as a certain “Doctor” does.
This is one area of argument in the science fiction world concerning time
travel antics. Were a man to go
back in time, would he go back to time before in his own dimension?
Or would that rupture in time-space cause a disturbance that would create
an alternate timeline?
Garden of Forking Paths seems to imply that these alternate timelines are all
overlapped and that they are occurring simultaneously where the doctor says that
in one timeline, Tsun came to him as an enemy while in another he came to him as
a friend. The timelines can diverge
and converge, and that appears to be the case here where Tsun comes to Albert
not as an enemy, but ends up killing him as though he were, converging the
timelines of friend and enemy into one.
Next, looking at yet another time traveling piece of literature, The Time
Machine, we have grounds for arguing that time is a straight line.
In this tale, the traveler of time states that time is simply a fourth
dimension existing alongside our three, and that his machine is a vehicle in
which to travel upon that plane.
The interesting thing to note about Time Machine is that it exhibits parts of
all our discussed material, and to me, is the richest of them all.
To start off with, the story does appear to follow a linear plot.
Though our protagonist does travel among time, nothing is changed in the
current time, nor does it state anywhere that a parallel universe has been
created. In addition to that, it
does not appear that there is any way to alter time as an alternate reality
would. Following that, he ends up in a
time period where humanity has apparently evolved beyond the need for strength
and has become simple and childlike due to the lack of struggle in the new
world.
A
seeming utopia right? At first
glance, yes. Would it not be a
fantastic world in where all people had to do to maintain their health was eat
fruit, and all work was gone and all that was left was play?
Seemingly this would be nice, but it has its downside.
These people, dubbed Eloi, are actually used as a food source for a
different race called the Morlocks who live underground.
Humanity here has apparently branched into two forms (a sort of
meta-reference to alternate reality as well as evolution) filling the roles of
both predator and prey, except the prey is more akin to cattle being bred for
slaughter. Seems more like a
dystopia for the Eloi.
Later
in the story, he travels millions of years into the future to the point where
our sun is on its deathbed where the only form of life he finds on a desolate
beach is a black bloblike thing.
Here we see an exhibition of the post-apocalyptic style because society has
disappeared entirely, as well as an evolutionary viewpoint where the world is
about to end and has reverted into its primordial soup so to speak.
The spiraling coexists with the linear plot, and looking at it from
outside as a reader it could be considered in some way an alternate reality
where time travel was discovered, though it may be by only a single man.
The views of a utopia, a dystopia, as well as a post-apocalyptic world
are all visible as well. Ozzy
Martinez puts it best as to why Time Machine sticks out for me as the best of
the bunch “Wells abandons the human problem and asks about the end of all
species, of all life, using humans as the central metaphor, that competition is
crucial to higher adaptive survival, or creature contentment will render the
subject alive but powerless.”
Linear progression, evolution, and alternative realities, oh my!
Cycles of creation and destruction, and survival beyond the end in
post-apocalypse? Literature
concerning itself with these themes and settings has so much to draw from before
even beginning to dip into the typical hero story or romanticism.
It is too much for a small analysis to successfully encapsulate, but
somewhere out there in a world of forking paths, I wrote my essay much sooner,
targeted themes with ridiculous precision, and got an absurdly high grade.
But that’s another story for another time.
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