(If you haven’t finished the book, I’d skip my post for the time being.\u00a0 I don’t want to ruin the end for you.)<\/p>\n
If “all plots tend to move deathward” (26), but nobody dies, then is the plot complete?\u00a0 I don’t believe the absoluteness of this statement, that all plots move in this direction, but the phrase and its failure to come to fruition in the novel called my attention to the multiple instances that failed in the novel.<\/p>\n
There are parallels to be found in the attempt of Orest to set his record of time spend in a space with venemous snakes and with Gladney’s way of dealing with Willie Mink.\u00a0 Gladney mentions his plan several times to “swivel my head to look into rooms, put him at his ease, wait for an unguarded moment, blast him in the gut three times for maximum efficiency of pain, take his Dylar, ger off at the river road, shut the garage door, walk home in the fair and the fog” (293).\u00a0 But neither of these events is realized in quite the way they had envisioned.\u00a0 Orest is forced underground, the humane society is against him and his attempt, four snakes are provided instead of twenty-seven and his is bitten within minutes.\u00a0 So despite the exhaustive preparation, his moment of glory only results in him being a “jerk” as Heinrich put it.\u00a0 Gladney’s revenge follows a similar pattern.\u00a0 He doesn’t put in the effort Orest does, but his revenge, his quest for Dylar, encounters results that are much the same.\u00a0\u00a0 He doesn’t kill Willie Mink; he is himself shot and on top of it all, he discovers nuns don’t believe in heaven and angels either (not immediately relevant, but an interesting conversation).<\/p>\n
The two events were both ways of challenging death, to stare it in the face (cliche, I know) or to absorb somehow the life of another by becoming a killer and not a “dier”.\u00a0 So what’s the conclusion about death then?\u00a0 If plots move deathward, but nobody dies and attempts to challenge death or gain life from death fail, then is it more about failure than death?\u00a0 Because it isn’t just Orest and Gladney who are failures (their’s just concern death), but there are additional things in the story: Dylar did not work, the town did not evacuate due to a strange smell, despite the extensive practice drills, and the supermarket fails to provide the comfort after re-arranging its shelves.\u00a0 Do all these failures tie in with the critique of consumerism and mass culture perhaps?\u00a0 I don’t know yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(If you haven’t finished the book, I’d skip my post for the time being.\u00a0 I don’t want to ruin the end for you.) If “all plots tend to move deathward” (26), but nobody dies, then is the plot complete?\u00a0 I don’t believe the absoluteness of this statement, that all plots move in this direction, but … Continue reading Failure<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[26,16,21],"class_list":["post-98","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-1","tag-heinrich","tag-real","tag-supermarket"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions\/100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}