Oppressive Regimes In Waiting For The Barbarians, By Night In Chile, And The City Of Angels

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Answer BOTH of the following questions in a coherent essay with a comparative perspective and specific textual examples.

1. In what ways and to what extent are the main characters of Waiting for the Barbarians, By Night in Chile, and The City of Angels complicit with the oppressive regimes in which they live or have lived? What are the reasons for this complicity? In what form does the guilt emerge in each case and what are its effects on the character’s psychology and actions? Do the characters attempt to justify themselves? If so, how?

2. What is the importance of dreams in The Place of Dreams and Brave New World? What might be the connections between the dreams and totalitarian political systems?

1. Urrutia Lacroix the main character in the story By Night in Chile, which to be true is a confession of the protagonist who believes that his time has arrived, and he would soon die. Reflects back on his life as a priest, a poet and a literary critic of the decisions he had made and how his personal gain and ignorance affected the lives of the Chilean People and other people around him and how it effected his own soul when he reflects back to the life he lived. Being a priest and a literary critique yields his authority over the political situation in Chile which results in the attention gained by the government and he is drafted to teach General Pinochet and the generals working under him the principles of Communism and Marxism so they can better understand their enemies which does result in a feeling of guilt for Urrutia but soon he realizes the government as a result of those teaching will provide him with a powerful protections and material gains which we can say was Urrutia price tag for his own morals, as long as he lived a comfortable life writing his literary criticism which he was more famous for than being a poet, and ignoring the turmoil in Chile and suggesting that the country should return to art and literature to save itself, ignoring the suffering the people are facing in the country as if literature would save them from the cruelty around, anything else did not really matter, Urrutia was an expert to close his eyes to his own morals as long as it fulfilled his wishes whether it be to do nothing when Farewell fondles his bottom, after all he has to be in good graces of him and be invited on all the parties or as mentioned above teach General Pinochet for the material gains he would get, his own confession as we read are half hearted and more of a simple explanation to the events that had occurred in his life. Through the readings we do realize he was a member of Opus Dei which held influential political ties and on his death bed his ‘wizened youth’ accuses him of selling his own soul. He does feel guilty of the things he did but only writes them as a confession once the rumors of his acts from his wizened youth start spreading. He though feeling guilty writes his confession as a simple explanation to the things he had done in his life. Much of his life he is pretty comfortable living and suppressing his guilt with the material and powerful gains he got so in my opinion it does not really reflect his psychology, he is only writing these confession as a simple autobiography, although he tries to justify his actions he does not deny what he did.

In Waiting for the Barbarians, a rather flawed main character of the story, explains the story mainly through his own perspective making him an unreliable narrator of it. He mainly wants to do his job in peace without questioning the motives of the Colonial Empire he lives till it comes to the point where Colonel Joll comes to confront the nomadic territories near his area of jurisdiction and confront with what he calls barbarians who are a threat to the empire, which in simple terms refers to capturing the nomadic people on the outskirts of the city and bringing them to jail and severely torturing them resulting in some of them actually dying cause of the torture. Magistrate is very complicit and calmly ignores the shouts that result in effect of the torture Joll inflicts on the nomad he captures and shuts his ear on them. Only it is a problem for him when this arrives at his doorstep and he has to deal with the mess that is created after. Apart from that he does not mind who the Empire tortures or what it does to keep it running, as a simple saying goes, “out of sight, out of mind”. He even turns his back even when they are tortured in his own the jurisdiction the fisherman by Colonel Joll, he does question Colonel Joll his method of finding truth through torture but little happens of that and the magistrate seeing this the magistrate returns to sleeping with the bird like women. As we see in the text above the Magistrate complies and understand what the empire does in order to maintain peace and the magistrate is pretty much in acceptance of that as long as its not happening in his outpost. To his own pleasure he tries to clean up the mess that is created after Colonel Joll leaves and asks for better services to be provided to the prisoners mainly the fisherman in this perspective and they be shown to doctor and let them return to their normal lives even though he wishes they be simply put in graves seeing they have been mentally and physically broken by Colonel Joll. When he rescues the nomad girl and tries healing her to see what she actually looks like behind the scars shows us the guilt he suffers, though he inflicts another sort of torture on the women more of a mental torture and demands her to tell what had happen to her in the prison even though she does not want to recall those memories, in short the magistrate cures her to her best probably for the guilt he felt to her suffering and embarks on a journey to return her back to her people where he makes love with her and during the final drop expresses his desire to marry her and take her back to the town which she refuses. This news is heard by the Officer Mandel and magistrate is put in jail and tortured in which he reflects how the nomadic girl must have been raped and tortured and how her father was tortured. By the end of it all magistrate returns back to his post, magistrate reflects on his guilt and does the best as explained above and now returns to his duties, though not the same person anymore.

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Christa Wolf in the City of Angels reflects her time in America during 1992-93, mainly in Santa Monica doing a self-examination of a person who identifies themselves from a country that does not seize to exist anymore and feels pride but at the same is lost in her beliefs. Wolf at the age of 64, has a new cased opened up against her which dated back to 1959-62 when in her thirties she sat down with secret police and answered question about fellow writers which in her defense was something that she did not remember and even when she recalls it back it’s a mere coincidence which is they were people in the state who would come and ask you questions related to you or others and she simply gave answers to it not realizing that 30 years later she would in the limelight with files suggesting her of being a Stasi informant. Wolf who felt pride in identifying herself as an East German and up to its fall still wished for it to exist and did not celebrate the end of the German Democratic Republic, and now she is crushed by the news that she had given information to Stasi as to her memory she was not even aware the people she talked to were related to the Stasi Organization. Wolf in the story reflects back that she was naive back in the days with full heartedly following what her State was propagating and going to West Germany and spreading these to the people there. Wolf in all honesty knows ever line written in her book would be used against her and people would often say it’s the easiest thing to which is to simply say you have forgotten what you had done in the past. According to Wolf justification she is presenting the story as it is with recurrence of the things that happened in the past and her problems with a lost identity and does not feel guilty about it. But is crushed and tormented hearing that because of something that happened thirty years ago would result in being removed as a great literary and that her own beliefs that had nothing in personal to do with anyone else would further ignite the fire to the accusations made against her.

2. In the Palace of Dreams Mark-Alem a descendant of the influential Koprulu Family has been assigned by his uncle to work at Tabir Sarai which responsibility is to study dreams and by studying them understand the future of the empire. The very core importance of dream in the the story is the states obsession in finding and analyzing every dream in every aspect, Mark-Alem climbs up in position in the Tabir Sarai he realizes that the palace is in extensive control and hides secrets than its actually acknowledged, in its ministry it holds subversive dreamers and tortures them and also pretty much kills whole families solely based on dream symbolism. Which in fact gives the empire an extensive control over the unconsciousness of a person and to punish and kill them over things developed in their mind without they themselves having to do very much with it. The connection between the dreams and its totalitarian political system needs no further explanations as the state seems to control every aspect of the dreams that occur in the lives of the people and tries controlling it in every aspect.

In the Brave New World novel set in a futuristic time period where the state genetically modifies and produces identical human embryos through the Bokanovsky and Podnsap process and are conditioned in five castes resulting in Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta or Epsilon. All the five caste made according to how the state wants them to be most importantly all of them capable of work but not of individual thinking, the state in its ritual such as the “Orgy-Porgy” blurs the distinction of love and emotion and instead makes it a ritual habit for its people so that they are in no way in control of their own thoughts or feeling but are a mere machine of the state whose sole purpose is to do what the state designed it to do according to the caste they belong too. And that is seen in the characters as Helmholts feels he has thoughts in his head that he struggles to express in writng or any other meaning and finds the dissatisfaction with the recreational sex and soma taking. And he wants to save his energy for more valuable things but fails to understand as to what they would and how to express it until he meets John The Savage (the one character born from a mother) who his whole life has read Shakespeare and helps Helmholts express his feeling. The importance of dream as seen in this little context of the whole story brings us to the point where the state produces people and conditions them to be in a way that they are unable to express themselves emotionally and are basic machine assigned a role by the state in whatever caste they are and are remained to feel that way. They have sex without the feel of love or connection with the person who they are having sex with. The state wants perfect human as to what they think is perfect which in general according to my opinon is just mere machines assigned to their duties and to live the life state assigns them to live according to its cast and keeps itself away from all emotions and thoughts.

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