03 May essay#3
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Dee Ananda
Professor Evans
English 102
2 November 2013
Living In a New Post Apocalyptic World:
An analysis of “Diary of an Interesting Year”
How would the world react to being thrown into a post apocalyptic setting? What behaviors and instincts would come out once the world is literally brought down to its knees? Author Helen Simpson seems to give us an account of how it might be through the eyes of the female character in her story. Helen is an author of short stories and novels and she resides in London. In an interview she states that relative subjects about everyday problems that could eventually lead to bigger problems, aren’t what people what to hear about or bother themselves with. She states that in the short stories, it’s meant to grab someone’s attention in the first couple of lines so they are intrigued to read through the story and possibly get a better understanding and feeling that things of this magnitude can possibly happen in the real world. Diary of an Interesting Year, Simpson lets us see how a freshly turned 30 year old woman in London views the world around her and the precautions and the actions she must take in what is happening around her. In director John Hillcoat’s film adaptation of “The Road,” Hillcoat wanted to show the movie audience that this story was about if you did survive an event of this magnitude, what would be the next step? He wanted to project exactly what humanity’s worst fears would be, are
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we prepared for it all, and how do we leave it all if it’s our time. He wanted the viewers own imagination to be the front runner in their process of analyzing and understanding this film. Though they are two different views and accounts of a post apocalypse earth, they drive to the same question, what would humanity do if we were ever met with this tragedy?
So how does the human mind psychologically view what people would call “The End of Times”? Doomsday seems to be something that is prevalent in all cultures and seems to span over all eras of time spanning back all the way to text in the Book of Daniel in the Bible. In an article, psychologist Jeff Greenberg explains that humans and animals have a basic survival mechanism hard grained inside of us, but unlike animals, humans are the only ones aware of their impending death and knowing that one day we must all come to an end. Greenberg believes that humans create cultural traditions and views that trick our minds to give us a sense of permanence in this world. He goes on to say that Armageddon’s attract people who feel insignificant with a hope of a better future. When it comes to religious persons views on the apocalypse, they feel the event would bring paradise to Earth or send their souls off into heaven. For Doomsday preppers, he feels that these people preparing for the worst case scenario is a way for them to avoid the anxiety of everyday life, because if they are doing something to prepare themselves then in the end they won’t be helpless when everything happens. In anthropologist Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death, he states that human civilization is just an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism to combat the knowledge of our own mortality and eventual demise and because of this it turns into our emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanisms. He
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feels that the human psyche bounces back and forth from a physical self and a symbolic self. In our symbolic selves, we make our mind believe in this “immortality project,” which makes us believe we can get through any dilemma with heroism which in turn makes us feel a sense of meaning and gives our lives purpose and significance to be a part of this world or a part of this doomsday. He states that people are experiencing depression, their heroism project is failing and these people are constantly reminded of mortality and their insignificance in the world. With people who suffer from major mental issues such as Schizophrenia, they don’t have the correct or sufficient defense mechanisms to defend their own mortalities. These people create their own worlds in which they are better hero’s in their own realities compared to the actual reality. We ultimately all create these false immortality projects to combat all the hate, destruction, and misery that we face everyday in this world. Becker believes that there is no perfect “hero-system” that anyone can create to solve the problem of humanity. He hopes that one day we all come to realize each others motivations and come to accept our eventual demise to help bring out a better world for the time we are here.
The end of times is a very scary thought to wrap ones mind around. It’s hard to accept that we must all one day meet our maker and let go of ourselves in this physical world. In Diary of an Interesting Year, the narrator of the story is a 30 year old woman living in a post apocalypse trying to adjust in the world around her. She writes her daily accounts in a little diary that her husband has given to her for her 30th birthday. The woman admits that the new world is a bit of a nightmare and she really has no idea how this all came about and has no real detail of the
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crisis they are in, only saying that her know it all husband keeps saying that he knew one day that this world would come to this. She says how she is not equipped or even ready to deal with what is going on around her and she has no idea how everyone else will now get thorough life without Google being a click away to get them through their everyday lives. Even though terrible things have happened and do happen to her, the narrator of the story seems to always stay optimistic through it all. The story starts to take a darker tone when her husband, who is neurotic and intellectual, can’t match up to the brute force and masculinity of the men who have now taken over their home and literally forced them out to search for a place North of where they are. Along the way the dairy inserts she writes show how ill equipped they are to face the harsh elements in the wild, despite the intellect they have. On their way, the woman’s husband is killed and she is taken captive by a man on the road where she is raped and beaten repeatedly almost everyday. One day she notices that she has become pregnant and decides that she does not want a child to be brought into this doomed world, instantly her survival instincts kick in and it’s a kill or be killed mentality. She almost becomes more animalistic and barbaric instantly when her own mortality and the mortality of the unborn child come into play. Her only thoughts are that she needs to get rid of this child to save it and to get away from this man so she can find safety and a new place to call home. She devises a plan to get this man to basically beat the child out of her, which works. She then waits for the intoxicated man to relive himself so she can push him down the tree to his death. She then goes on to bury her child in her finest shirt, to me it almost symbolizes that this child would have and possibly is loved, but this was not the world for a child
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to be born into. With the child she buries her dairy that has run out of pages with the last line of “Good Luck,” as she moves on in search of new land.
In John Hillcoat’s film adaptation of The Road, the characters in the story do not have names. Like Diary, I feel like both the writer and this director wanted their audiences to be able to imagine themselves in these same exact scenarios. The movie shows Man and son making their way through the world they once knew that was destroyed by an environmental catastrophe. Everyone’s concept of moral behavior that they once followed is now thrown out of the window and it becomes a survival of the fittest. The father in the movie puts himself thought very harsh conditions and develops an almost inhuman resiliency to conquer the hardships and scavenge the things they need to survive. With the two always being on high alert, the father drills into the son to always be aware of the bad guys, but in a sense you can feel that they don’t know if they are also becoming bad guys because of their once moral code contradicting the survival mechanism that they are met with internally. Of the possessions they have with them, the most prized one is their gun with only two bullets left. The father knows that he needs to prepare himself that if they can not make it through this alive, he must take his sons life as well as his own to save them from the hell that is left on earth. Although they are together on this journey, it’s almost as if they are alone because the father cannot confide in his son and the son cannot explain his fears to his father. The movie goes on to show the two in different scenes basically just trying to survive and make it out of possible situations where they could die. Through finding shelter and finding provisions, keeping alive and fighting off cannibals, the Man begins to grown increasingly ill. At
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one point the set up a tent near the ocean because the man can see that the son is also starting to fall ill. While the father is out in search to see if there is anything useful in a crashed boat that is near to their campsite. While he is off in the boat, the man and his son are completely robbed of every possession they have which causes the father, holding his sick son, to go on the search for the thief with his pistol in hand. With the thief’s only protection being a knife, he gives all their belongings back including the clothes off his back that the father asked for. In this instant we see just how far gone the father is. He is completely lost in his survival mode that he feels no remorse for the thief and essentially wants to leave him there to freeze to death while the son pleads to him to leave the clothes there for the man which eventually the man is brought back down to his moral code and when they can’t find the man, he leaves his clothes where they last saw him. Closer to the end of the movie, due to an injury he sustains and his pre-existing illness, the Man can tell that he is going to die very soon. He tells the boy to continue South and remember everything he has taught him and to keep on the go like they have been. The son says that he wants to die with his father but the father ultimately decides that he cannot become that barbaric to take his son’s life and he goes on to tell his son that his whole heart is within his son and for that reason the son must go on. In this one scene we see what is left of the Man’s previous life and we see that he has not completely lost himself in this new world. After the father dies, a man with two children and woman appear to the boy and he is given the choice to join them or to stay. He asks the man if he is good and can he be trusted which the man answers that he is good but that the boy is just going to have to trust him. The boy then kisses his father
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goodbye and tells him he will do everything that he taught him. The woman touches the boys face and tells him they have been following the two of them for a long time, and he does not need to worry anymore because he is going to be taken care of now.
Both the story and movie give the audience a sense that the end of times will bring out the absolute worst of people and show their natural barbaric and survival mentalities. It shows that all morality and knowing the difference between what is good and what is bad will essentially not be able to overcome some peoples natural instincts. In Diary, I feel that the author almost gives a feeling that there is no hope for positivity and once you have truly tapped into your barbaric state, there is no hope of you going back to the person you once knew or you once were, that it is essentially every man for himself. In The Road, I feel like the son is almost a symbol of the man’s conscious before this catastrophe happened. It seems that every time the man seems to get a little more lost in the world he is now in, the son pulls him out helps him view things at a level that he would see them before the apocalypse. The movie almost gives the viewer a sense of hope that if this circumstance actually does happen, a huge portion of the world will turn to their inner instincts of survival mode, but not everyone will become so cold and savage. It makes you believe that there will be some people who will do what they need to survive, but they won’t lose their sense of humanity for other people. The Diary almost just gives me a feeling that all hope is lost and once you turn to the other side, you are gone forever and there is no way of you turning into or having a piece of your old self.
In conclusion to this essay, when it comes to thoughts of the end of the world it’s as if our
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mind goes though a few realizations of “what if this could really happen,” and “this really could actually happen.” If we were all met with this struggle of having to live on this nightmarish world it’s hard to say what one person would do. In a world where we are constantly living in fear of the other people that are left on this world with us, I’m sure that the first thing on a lot of people’s minds would be to take themselves out of this hell that they are left behind in. Most people wouldn’t be able to live in a world where every waking moment of their lives is going to be fear that others out there are going to kill them to take their things because of human natural instinct to survive in harsh circumstances. In a world were government crumbles and you are your own judge and executioner, people fear the chaos that a situation like this could throw the world in. In all actuality, we as a race need to accept the fact that one day the end is going to come for all of, whether in a doomsday setting or something different, death comes to meet us all and we may not be ready for it but we need to accept it. We need to appreciate each day that we have and we need to cherish is because when the end comes there is really nothing we can do. We set up these fantasies in our minds that we can prepare ourselves for the end gather our supplies and rations that we will all need and do anything and everything we can to survive. The problem that we as humans need to face is that if and when the end comes, our whole race and what we know will be gone and taken away from us. There is no scenario that we can ultimately create for ourselves where we become the hero of our own stories. We must all accept out fate and our mortality so that we can learn to live and love in the time that we are all here on this earth together so we can make it better while we are here.
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Works Cited
Gharraie, Jonathan. At Work. The Paris Review. 28 Feb. 2012. Web. 2 Nov. 2013. <www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/28/helen-simpson-on-’in-flight-entertainment’/.>
The Road. Dir. Hillcoat,John. Writers. McCarthy, Cormac. Penhall, Joe. Perf. Mortensen, Viggo. Theron, Charlize. McPhee, Kodi. Duvall, Robert. 2 Dec. 2009. DVD
Roberts, Shiela. Director John Hillcoat Interview The Road. The Collider. 21 Nov. 2009. Web. 2 Nov. 2013. <m.collider.com/collider/#!/entry/director-john-hillcoat-interview-the- road,5194611dda27f5d9d0c622d5>.
Knight, Sara. Apocalypse Psychology: Deeper Reasons Why Some Expect Doomsday. Wbur’s Common Health Reform and Reality. 20 Dec. 2012. Web. 2 Nov. 2013. <www.commonhealth.wbur.org/2012/12/apocalypse-psychology..>
Becker, Ernest. “The Denial Of Death.” 1973. Book. Web. 2 Nov. 2013.
<www.en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death.>
Ebert, Roger. The Road Review. Roger Ebert Reviews. 24 Nov. 2009. Web. 2 Nov. 2012. <www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-road-2009.>
Simpson, Helen. “Diary of an Interesting Year.” The New Yorker. 21 Dec. 2009. Web. 2 Nov. 2013. <www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/12/21/091221fi_fiction_simpson>.
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