Feb 06 2008
Heartbroken- Parable of the Sower Conclusion
After reading “Parable of the Sower”, I was heartbroken. I became disgusted with the world around me as Octavia Butler exposed me to the ugly truths that I was all too familiar with: racism still exists and it is worse than ever, the middle class are becoming poor, the environment is going to hell, drug addiction is out of control, and the worst part is that society will just ignore all these problems until they blow up in our faces with chaos and anarchy taking over, just like they did in Butler’s novel.
Butler gives us various hopeful situations to solving these problems. Unfortunately, every single one she slowly crushes and kills. Butler introduces us to Lauren, a character with hyperempathy. Such a unique disease of feeling others’ pain that one quickly wonders what the world would be like if everyone had such a disorder. Would there be peace on earth? Hell no. Butler destroys this dream of any good coming from this disorder by showing that we’d be helpless in helping each other or better yet, we’d kill all those in pain just so we wouldn’t have to suffer. People with broken bones would quickly be executed to save the suffering we’d have to endure. Maybe this is Butler’s way of saying that society can’t just understand or feel the pain of those who are suffering. That would do no good. By helping others people would have to face their agony. So instead people just try to hide from others’ misery.
Through Lauren, the reader also gets the hope of a girl determined not ignore society’s problems but instead face them head on with the idea of changing the world into a better place. Our wish that Lauren can change the world is also killed by Butler. She makes our hope in Lauren change into disgust as Butler changes Lauren into a cross-dressing religious extremist that slowly begins to justify killing and stealing in her philosophy of change. Her obsession with her father and sleeping with someone who reminds her of her father and is her father’s age is not to pleasant either.
Even the hope of educating others to these problems is shattered by Butler. In the book people don’t even want to know about societies’ problems but instead want to live inside their walled communities. When Lauren tries to educate her community of the terrors of the outside and being prepared, she is just ignored and even punished for scaring people. It’s as if Butler is telling us that there are all these horrible things in our society and there is nothing we can do about it because people don’t want to do anything about it. We can’t make a philosophy for everyone to follow, we can’t just try to feel others’ pain that their in, we can’t fight racism because it’s unidentifiable, and we can’t really educate those who just want to live inside their little “bubbles”, so what can we do? Butler succeeds in ripping out our little hearts and leaving us to bleed to death. Hopefully our hearts are mended a little in Butler’s sequel by giving us a little hope in mankind.
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I agree. The book explains that there is no hope in our society to break through what we need to break through in the near future. Everyone always talks about how shitty the world is going to be. I honestly don’t want to believe it but I do.
Dave
Let me suggest the following in order to complicate this discussion a little further:
what we have here is essentially a discussion about the role of culture in the collective process of exposing problems of the present and imagining a better future.
There are, however, two ways a work of art can go about doing this:
1) painting a picture of a better future (which is a version of the future thought from the perspective of today, hence essentially nothing but an extension of our present logic);
2) not offering a precise imagination of the future and instead helping us to complicate the way we think about possible ways of fixing problems–in other words, such a work of art is primarily interested in forcing us to change the ways we *think* in order to bring about a future that is truly different than the present and avoid repeating mistakes we made in the past.
Into which category do you think Butler’s novels fall and how does this influence your reading of the development Lauren and her community/religion undergo?
Butler’s novel falls under the second category. I never really thought about it in that way and Butler made me think about our future in a way that I never thought about but it’s just uncomfortable thinking about it. As she repeats several times in her novel that people don’t want change and that includes not wanting to think about it. Butler’s novel forces us to do just that and it’s hard and frustrating. And that what makes her book a good book but one you wish you never read in the first place.
I would also have to agree that Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” fits more into the second category. While Lauren dreams of a nicer future, she is not sure what lies ahead for her. Instead of creating an image of the future Lauren changes and has others change their beliefs in order to maybe have a brighter future. In a way she is doing trial and error approach with the people of Acorn.
I also have to agree that our society oddly resembles that of the one in the “Parable of the Sower.” However I feel that it would be very difficult to go into total chaos as in the book. There are too many security features built into the government to reach such lows and too many other countries that would need to fail as well.
I’ll have to agree with both on the fact that the book falls into the second category. The only problem is that the events in the book are unrealistic like the person above me said. I just don’t see society becoming the way it was in the book with people turning into savages. It makes Butler’s book interesting, but at the same time, how could readers take her solutions for the future seriously when these events are unrealistic? I just think she kinda contradicts herself.
I strongly disagree because society is not far from what is described in this book. When this novel was written many of these things were exaggerated by butler; nevertheless I feel several scenarios and descriptions explained by Butler are already in their early stages in present society. This may be unrealistic to some, but with the increase in unnecessary violence and drug related crime since this novel was written, I believe that this type of extremely corrupt society is much closer than we think; especially in the United States.