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Post by gnicholson3 on Jun 10, 2024 19:48:09 GMT
“I often felt like an adolescent first entering the adult world where everyone is strange and individual. I was always ready to mistake opinion for fact” (Mailer 253). This quote stood out to me because it felt very familiar, in the way that I recognize myself in the mirror. I’ve often thought about the transition from my teenage years to my mid-twenties and reflect on the beliefs that have changed via propaganda, research, gossip, or experience; there’s always a sense that not only the things that I’ve done, but also the things that I believe in affect others and their respective actions and beliefs have affected me. This is also paired with the belief that nothing I do or believe in affects anyone at all on a grand scheme. This idea paired with Mailer’s later quote— “When you have to, it’s pretty convenient to think of yourself as driftwood”—helps to solidify this idea that a change has occurred between adolescence and adulthood, in which one becomes aware of the almost senseless drifting one does towards the future (325). Mailer seems to indicate that the things you say and believe in do matter: “Dinsmore was to muddle my impression of Guinevere, so Mcleod was to mislead me about Hollingsworth,” yet Mikey seems to be capable of seeking his own understanding of things (512). We see this in the way he questions Guinevere about her “boyfriend” Hollingsworth in chapter eight (1019). Mikey seems to be in a push/pull relationship with the people around him much like driftwood being pushed and pulled by a river’s current.
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Post by Dr. Nemmers on Jun 10, 2024 22:12:06 GMT
I had that same driftwood quote marked in my book, Grace--- I think it does a great job of summing up Mikey's overall disposition. But it's true of really all the characters here, especially Lannie, who literally seems to drift in and out of the scene and throughout her entire life.
It's a good point to observe that though these characters are "adults," they're not really much more than their mid-twenties, and times have changed with regard to the developmental curves we expect from your youth. Back in the 1950s it was quite normal for people to marry when they were eighteen or nineteen, and to have multiple children and a career by the time they were 22 or 23-- when a lot of you are set to graduate from college. For Mike Lovett and those of his ilk to be drifting through life at that age is pretty aberrant, even if now we allow for the stage of "emerging adulthood"--- i. e. time for people to figure it out.
Along with the notion of Mike as driftwood comes the metaphor of mike as "a cripple" (p. 70 in my book)-- this he claims about himself when speaking with Guinevere. This is not in a physical sense, of course, but emotionally, psychologically, whathave you. Depending on the support structure, a "cripple" may need others to help him move, or lift their body, or sometimes even perform basic human functions.
Whatever the metaphor-- driftwood or cripple--these characterize Mike as unable to move himself, lacking in agency and purpose. Sound about right?
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Post by gnicholson3 on Jun 11, 2024 16:24:42 GMT
Yes, Dr. Nemmers. It is about agency. He also seems worried about all the wrong things, or at least the things that are deemed as most important by societal standards of today. He frequently writes and then tears the pages away and gets nowhere with his novel and then uses his work time to talk to others and chase after Guinevere. I also marked the 'cripple' quote in my novel as being significant. Cripple, the word, has a connotation more with the physical body than the mental state of someone in my opinion, and his scar on his head is a physical reminder of the injury he received. I wonder, in Mailer's time, if psychological pain or TBI's were something that were not well understood, researched or talked about in a way that left those injured as alive but not really living, drifting if you will.
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Post by Dr. Nemmers on Jun 11, 2024 19:49:35 GMT
Right, and one fruitful way of looking at Mike Lovett is as a "shell-shocked" (PTSD) war veteran who has become an amnesiac (electively, selectively, or otherwise) in order to deal with the psychic wounds from this trauma.
There's a lot of literature produced after WW1 that gives us the portrayal of such men-- namely Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. But we see this figure across European literature, French, German, British, whatever. In some of Hemingway's works we do see the ravages of the war on the soldier (namely Nick Adams).
But it's not until much later in American history that we get popular images of soldiers returning from foreign wars with PTSD and such. Vietnam and Iraq come to mind immediately-- there's no lack of such men in popular and literary media.
What does it mean that Mike is the shell-shocked soldier from the war we won? Does that make being a "cripple" or piece of "driftwood" more likely, better, worse?
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