Reflection on the Power and the Glory: Exploring Existentialism

All great people in the world are great because they believe in what they do; they have such strong conviction. When a person has no conviction, what is their purpose here on planet Earth? They abuse the precious life that they were given without leaving their mark as a human. Even if a person has a belief in a bad thing, they are still living for something. A twisted human soul appears very ironic for us, yet seems so common in the novel The Power and the Glory. Every single character in this novel has different perspectives of how they should live their lives, whether it be for a good reason, for the wrong reason, or to feel nothing at all. Conviction gives us the answer to the question, "Why am I here?" and without it, that question will remain unanswered and worthless.

A typical priest is married to the church, devoted to their religion and beliefs and convictions. For a priest to have a marriage outside of the church, not only would it be frowned upon, but strictly forbidden. The irony in this novel is so strong that the priest—one with no recognized name symbolizing nothingness—is an alcoholic attempting to feel nothing in his life. He breaks the regulation a priest should have by having a short relationship with a woman named Maria. The outcome of this was failure for the priest to obey rules as well as a baby girl named Brigitta. A man like this in our society who has so many flaws would be shunned and have awful prejudice thoughts towards him. People would think of him as nothing just like he thinks of himself, worthless. Asking himself, "Why am I here?" gives him some direction in his life, yet always refrains from asking the question and revert back to his old ways.

Children should obtain innocence, however, Brigitta seems stoic and like an adult in a child’s body, which is the exact opposite of children today—a child who portrays emotion and utilizes their innocence. She doesn’t get along with other children for the reason that she grew up so quickly and her family wasn’t like her peers’ families with both a mother and a father. Brigitta, like her alcoholic father, has no value to her life. With her dark, twisted personality, you wouldn’t expect her to do an act of kindness since she seems like she believes in nothing, yet she saves her father from being arrested and found by the police. If the priest hadn’t encountered Maria, Brigitta would be a normal child, but his neglect to follow rules as a priest led her to be an outcast, a nobody, nothing at all.

Very comparable to the Mechanical Hound in the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Mr. Tench has no human soul; there is nothing that he, himself, believes in, so he just goes along with any conventions that appear in his life. Along without obtaining any conviction, he takes orders as if he were a robot. “Good God, one ought to do something… Of course there was nothing to do.” (216) The thoughts of this man are also structured and robotic, like his actions. He thinks that he needs to do something when there is something to do, but needs to be told to do it. Until he learns to do things on his own, he will never truly have conviction for anything or have a purpose to his life. When asking himself, “Why am I here?”, he wouldn’t know the answer and would need direction to answer it correctly, to get a task done the way someone else wants to, to see nothing through his own eyes.

One of the most hopeful characters in the novel would be Coral Fellows who has such motherly behavior, even more motherly than her own mother. This young, thirteen-year-old girl unlike some of the characters in the novel has a strong conviction that she truly believes in, and unlike most of the characters, it’s for a good purpose: to help. All she wants to do is help and assist others in what they do. She lends out a helping hand when the whiskey priest comes along and is willing to help him even though her parents are not. At a point in the novel, Coral is the priest’s only hope, the only one who accepts him and protects him, the only one who gives the slightest care to his messed up life, the only one willing to understand what he has gone through. Without characters like Coral, this novel would have absolutely no happiness.

Conviction: a fixed or firm belief. Nearly all people in the world have conviction for one thing or another, yet many characters in The Power and the Glory aren’t supposed to be worth anything and literally symbolize nothing in the words written on the pages of this novel. These characters choose not to believe in anything. They choose not to. All of these characters purposely exclude feelings from their lives. Many of them do not want to answer the existential questions that come along. Rather than living for something, for a goal of some sort, to believe in anything, they live to do nothing, aspire to do nothing, to believe in nothing, to be nothing themselves.

Life of Pi Reflection Essay

In the novel Life of Pi, Piscine Molitor Patel, otherwise known as Pi, lives in a life of paradox. All of the things that occur in this novel balance out equally. Pi relied on his conventions during the beginning of the novel and threw them out the window once he climbed aboard the life boat. Animals and humans create one person in this novel, with the animals playing the role as another side of the humans; Pi forgets all conventions as a human when his animal side shines through.

A taboo is a topic difficult to have a conversation on, and on the opposite end of the spectrum is a convention which is an agreed upon subject that is safe and comfortable to talk about. Conventions are like a locked up room with walls on all four sides and the only opening secured shut. This border that allows you to wander around in the general area represents safety. Our brains are wired in the way that we sometimes fear the unknown therefore enjoy to have our own, fixed area. "Animals are territorial. That is the key to their minds." (17) Animals, like humans, need the assurance that they have safety. Near the beginning of this novel, Pi experiences the gruesome scene of a goat being torn to shreds and it involved so much pain that he wouldn’t dare express his feelings about it nor bring it up to talk about from that point on. Further along in the novel, Pi is stranded on a life boat and his survival mode kicks in. Then and only then is when the Bengal tiger climbs aboard. "I descended to a level of savagery I never imagined possible." (197) He becomes forced to live outside of conventions creating another side of himself.

Understanding how a man can survive on a small life boat with a ferocious tiger on board is very difficult to understand until the idea comes up that the man and the tiger are actually one, single person. Richard Parker, the name of the Bengal tiger, is not really tiger but rather an alter ego for Pi. He thought this terrible side of him would kill him since it was irregular human behavior. This explains how the Richard Parker never slaughtered Pi, how they went blind at the exact same time, how both the man and the tiger regained their vision once again, and how they easily fit on the boat, however. It seems very hard to believe that Pi killed the hyena especially considering the hyena was also human.

Plato’s The Allegory Cave involves a man who lives among many people in a cave and he decides he wants to get out and discover how other humans live. "The three-toed sloth is not well informed about the outside world." (4) The sloth here is in the same situation as the man in the story and simply wants to see the world for what it is. This, however, is an example of a man breaking the agreed upon conventions. In Life of Pi, animals like to have barriers around them, but sometimes the animals gain the curiosity to know how the rest of their species lives. This doesn’t necessarily make zoo animals dangerous, just curious. “[E]scaped zoo animals are not dangerous absconding criminals but simply wild creatures seeking to fit in.” (42)

Paradox comes into play throughout the entire novel with several concrete examples. The hyena that is on the lifeboat with Pi actually is the character of the cook; the zebra also the sailor and Orange Juice, the orangutan, is Pi’s mother. When the hyena slays the zebra and decapitates the orangutan, the cook is really eating the sailor alive and taking of the head of Pi’s mom. "Its delights are too many to admit disgust at anything." (117) The people were all so feeble on this boat and the cook had reached such a severe state of starvation that he didn’t care if he persecuted these animals in a disgusting way, but found a happiness in having a full stomach; he didn’t want it to be repulsive so decided to not think of it as wrong. Another example of paradox, portrayed so clearly in this novel, is how life and death rely on each other. "The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity—it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can." (6) Life is such a miracle because death is such a tragedy. If we didn’t have catastrophic things happen in the world, life wouldn’t be so precious which is the reason why even death has a jealousy of life.

Life of Pi incorporates many ideas including paradox and conventions. From Pi growing up in a type of environment with animals, he grew to be just like them. Pi has his conventional, obedient lifestyle and then comes out his unconventional, rebellious, animal side. The creation of this other side of Pi allowed him to escape from his normal life and kept him from feeling the guilt he should from the hideous things he does to fellow humans on the lifeboat. This novel couldn’t bring these ideas out any clearer. For us as humans, including Pi, after being in an atmosphere for a long period of time, we change, so Pi changed many of his previous conventions to fit this renewed style of life. He gained knowledge from his treacherous journey in the wild, just as we will grow and flourish into our new selves.

The Effect Television Has on Us - Relation to Fahrenheit 451

The Effect Television Has On Us

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The relation of this article to Farenheit 451 is that TV can control one person, and when they step away from the screen like Guy Montag did, they strive to fix the world's problems.