Life of Pi- The Danger of Fiction

In the novel Life of Pi, Pi is faced with more stress in two years than most are exposed to in their entire life, and it is all Pi can do to put it into the back of his mind and stop reliving it every second of the day. The magnitude of the events weighs so heavily upon him that he cannot bear the load, and thus as most of the world does in times of crisis, Pi creates Richard Parker for the same reason a toddler creates an imaginary friend: escapism. Richard Parker is the recipient of all the stress that Pi just can't handle, and Pi is no longer scarred. Now, however, because of this division Pi is unstable, and even at the end of the book ends up hiding and hoarding food as if he will die if he doesn’t. This instability is made obvious at the end as Pi’s true point: fiction can be very dangerous.

When Pi’s suffering began he was cast away into the sea with a man with a broken leg according to the human story, and was sent out to sea. The entrance of Richard Parker is a symbol of the instincts Pi knows he will need to survive. From there he tries to survive with a near-insane cannibal who is slowly eating the broken-legged man. When “Orange Juice”, Pi’s mother, arrived, Pi at least has more company than the cannibal. But she will soon be killed by the psychotic threat, not able to repel him for long, and is soon eaten. This is when Pi begins to separate himself from Richard Parker.

When his mother is killed by the cannibal he is threatened by him as the next prey, and his instincts emerge as he ravages and kills him, eating him instead. This is where he really starts to accept “Richard Parker” as half of himself, and his escapist approach to life is revealed. Pi is now entering the trap so many stressed individuals fall into.

Pi is now alone and when flying fish jump, he sees food and cannot restrain his instincts and this shows how firmly he believes in his story. Supposedly while he ineptly fumbled about, Richard Parker
agilely swats many fish right out of the sky. Really his instincts have taken over and he went killer, annihilating fish after fish, as will be seen with the meerkats. Pi has truly split into two.

Pi uses this story to escape from the things he saw, to attempt to avoid the events he experienced. He doesn’t acknowledge that people are cruel without going insane because of the taste of a scar-free life. Taking back the truth and covering his weak spots is not possible

In the novel Great Expectations, one of Pip’s greatest drops along his tragic fall is the sluice gate visit with Orlick. This scene clearly portrays the bizarre motives Orlick had for killing Pip. Although Orlick may have been suffering from more of the influence of alcohol on his mind than the influence his mind itself had on his actions, this is Dickens’s way of showing the world that when one person rises, another falls. Any time a gain is made, the opposite takes a fall just as great.
Orlick’s motive for killing Pip solidifies this, as the only thing Orlick had against Pip was that he took his job in the forge. Pip rose into a position in the forge through being close to Joe, as well as being a hard worker and being more trustworthy than Orlick. When Pip rose, the one who had to fall was Orlick. This was amplified when Pip rose to the rank of gentleman. When this happened, Orlick was more angry than ever, with everyone looking up to Pip, and in doing so down on him, the town tramp, the low-life.
Orlick finally had his shot at revenge for how far down Pip inadvertently shoved him, and he snapped it up like a demented, rabid dog on death’s threshold. The alcohol was his rabies, and through his dementia he was shown a final truth: When people looked up to Pip, they threw all those below them down further to catch him. And the target of all the pushing down was none other than Orlick.

Veteran’s day is a day made to honor the heroes that defend our country with their own bodies, willing to give their lives to save us. Is this the right time to honor them? There is one clear answer: no, they deserve thanks for as long as the sacrifices they made will protect this nation.

Veterans always deserve to be honored because they never restricted their services to one day, and yet we have restricted our thanks to them to only one day as if they are not worthy of mention on every day of every year, as if they risked their lives to keep us safe and we are oblivious and angry toward them, as if these incredible people who never thought twice about putting their lives on the line for our safety are somehow insignificant and something to be ashamed of. Veterans need to be honored for this.

Another of the many reasons a veteran should always be honored is because of their courage. Courage comes in two types. Physical courage is courage of action, which they have since they fling their own bodies into harm’s way. The second is not as common, and that is moral courage, the courage to stand up for one’s own beliefs. When a veteran is fighting, what is he fighting for? What he believes in. A veteran believes in our safety and our prosperity. That is moral courage, standing up for our safety, and their goal.

Veteran’s day and Memorial day are the only official days to remember our veterans. Every day, even if it is not an official celebration, they deserve to be remembered in our hearts and in our minds. Veterans are incredible people with only one goal and one motivation: our safety. Therefore they deserve our eternal thanks and gratitude for as long as their services have protected our country and our way of life.

In the novel The Good Earth, the main character, Wang Lung, is a happy, healthy, content farmer, working in his fields, plowing, hoeing, planting, and living life the way he should: simple, ignorant, and uninvolved in the affairs of rich men, only desiring a good harvest, given nothing more than the gift of hard work. However, when his desire to have children became too much for him, the ways of rich men seeped into him in the House of Hwang like invisible, odorless poison, making him greedy for everything: power, money, land, slaves, and most of all, to conquer the great house. All this is his tragic flaw: this invisible poison that is dissatisfaction strangles the life out of him with its never-ending desires.

The first example of Wang Lung’s never-ending hunger is seemingly innocent, only a wish to be married. The true reason he wanted to be married was made clear when he was filling the kettle with water to give to his father. He himself said he would like nothing better than to never have to do this again, thinking of how submissive his wife would have to be to him, and how he would finally have power and authority over someone. At this point, he still has control over his desires, however he will soon lose control.

Having visited the House of Hwang, Wang Lung immediately starts to lose his grip on his desires, and he starts going downhill. His first bad decision is to buy land from the great House of Hwang. Instead of saving up for the coming winter, he wastes almost all his silver on land. He is not yet completely corrupted yet, since directly after he bought the land, he regretted it and wished he had the silver back in his hands, but by the end of the chapter, he has already lost the vast majority of his grip on his greed and dissatisfaction, and sees his land in a whole new way. ‘’And so this parcel of land became to Wang Lung a sign and a symbol.’’ A sign and symbol of his ravenousness and dissatisfaction, wanting more sway over not just his poor wife O-lan, but over the whole town.

Everyone deserves a second chance, though, as evidenced by the drought, which attempted to give him a chance to rethink his ways by cutting him off from his land and destroying his wealth, and attempting to make him part with the Hwang’s land, as well as his evil ways. His greed and dissatisfaction already have set their roots too deep to be killed, however, as he refuses to part with the land of the Hwang before he leaves to the south to save his family, and in doing so rejects the hand of salvation and continues letting the poison of dissatisfaction run through him.

When Wang Lung returned from the city wealth less, all he could think about was land and money. So when he was successful again in farming, the trial began of whether he would succumb to the dissatisfaction or not began. The conclusion of this trial was clear when he bought the girl from the teahouse, Lotus. Seeing her every night wasn’t enough for his lust, so he bought her for his own toy, his pleasure, his indulgence. For a long time she practically owned him, forcing him to do things for her or buy her something expensive before he indulged, and his lust grew to a strength that made it the sole emotion in Wang Lung’s heart.

The coming of Lotus, who was to Wang Lung the perfect being, caused him to notice imperfection in everyone else around him. The most distinguished case was with his wife, O-lan, who was, in his description, huge-footed, fat, and clumsy, which is a titanic symbol of his dissatisfaction completely taking over; He was once pleased with her and thought she was beautiful, but once he gave his worse side a taste of the indulgent life, it would fight to his demise until it got what it wanted, and nothing can escape its path of rampage, not even his faithful wife.

Soon Wang Lung buys more land from the great house and his whole life is swept away by the great, overwhelming chief emotion he has, dissatisfaction, and he falls into an infinitely deep hole from which he can never hope to escape alone. He is no longer satisfied with working in his fields, and wants others to do it for him, so he buys a slave. Soon Lotus complains about her lack of attendance and Wang Lung buys her her old mistress Cuckoo as a slave, and is finally temporarily satisfied by having so many under his thumb after he has bought every slave he can find, and for a small while he is free of his strongest emotion.

As Wang Lung is falling into the hole, another hand is extended to help him in the form of the flood, which drowns his crop and cuts off his money supply again. Wang Lung is given a chance to free his slaves and love his old wife. This time, though unlike the last time, has the same outcome. He is already too rich. His money store is hardly affected and he swats the hand away, preferring the hallucination of luxury in the distance, far down the hole, where nothing waits but his doom.

With Wang Lung’s dissatisfaction comes immense pride. When the House of Hwang falls, his one and only thought is to live there and own the place where royalty had lived as a symbol of his power, and his former jealousy. And so he does, paying the immense amount of money to do so and his dissatisfaction is still greedy yet faint like a leech whose host can no longer support it, and its final siphoning of his emotion is soon to follow with the last of Wang Lung’s life.

This final siphoning of the greedy parasite of lust is in the form of Wang Lung’s affair with Pear Blossom. This shows not even the most beautiful woman he had seen in the majority of his life could keep him happy forever. Eventually he tired even of his precious Lotus, demanding to have more indulgence than before. Wang Lung never was happy, nor will he ever be.

In conclusion, Wang Lung has many flaws, such as hate, envy, greed and pride. But when it boils down to the root of all these problems, the true problem is revealed in his dissatisfaction. He could have turned his life around at any time before the end of the flood. He could have dumped Lotus back into the tea house, sold the land of the Hwang, and gone back to the way things were, simple and pure. In conclusion, Pearl Buck why he didn’t go back when he knew it would save him is that he was too weak to resist the power of his dissatisfaction, giving into it was his fatal flaw that would torture him all his life.