I have to admit, every page I turned in this week’s reading was upsetting. I want the end of the world catastrophe to hit! There are many characters, but only one really provides me with mutliple, thougthtful speculation: Fred Lauren. In class we discussed how the book is filled with contrasting couplings (old money v new money, emotional v rational, street\/nature\/common sense smart v technical\/educated smarts), but I think Lauren has a very cryptic contrast. He is completely different from all other characters, a solitary observer and not much is revealed except that he has mental issues and sex offenses. No other character in the book is mentally unhinged like him.\u00a0 No other characters even seem to have quirks\/ticks, let alone full out violent pyschological tendencies.\u00a0 I think Fred Lauren’s personality\/mind is a symbol of the comet. On page 110: “Fred’s eye suddenly painted it with flame. The stucco wallow around the window flashed blinding light, which died slowly to reveal curtains flaming…Fred saw her bathed in the light of Hammerfall. Colleen glowed like a star…robe charring, long blonde hair crisping, blackening, flaming…and she was gone before they had met. Fred turned away from the telescope.” Its as though Fred’s distant watching is equivalent to the distant comet. Fred sees a firey death of Colleen, and later on the book tells he kills her. So Fred ( the comet) kills Colleen (the rest of the world), in fire. Does anyone else feel that that Fred embodies the comet’s ultimate purpose? And then when Fred does kill Colleen, gruesomely by taking her breast and drawing an arrow in blood to her genitals, I thought it was a symbol for the end of fertility, reproduction, motherhood. Just like the comet will be taking life, mother Earth. I think Fred Lauren is an eerie and perverted foreshadowing of the comet’s goals and capabilities.<\/p>\n
by: Laura Kelly<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have to admit, every page I turned in this week’s reading was upsetting. I want the end of the world catastrophe to hit! There are many characters, but only one really provides me with mutliple, thougthtful speculation: Fred Lauren. In class we discussed how the book is filled with contrasting couplings (old money v… Continue reading Thoughts on Lucifers Hammer<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":165,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions\/165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}