Since the last blog post, I've finished the book and it was extremely weird. Orr has realized the antagonist role Dr.Haber plays and has started to grow as a character. George, after dreaming away 6 billion people, decided that Haber obviously has malicious intentions but is too afraid of his own dreams so he continues going to therapy sessions. In an attempt to fix everything and ditch Haber, he retreats to a remote cabin where Heather tries to hypnotize him and get him to dream about a better Haber. He ends up dreaming an entire race of angry aliens into existence that want to go to war with the humans but at the last moment he dreams of peace. Now aliens live in the community as if they always have and he sits around listening to Beatles music. This book loosely reminds me of a book called The Bone Witch because the main character acts similarly to George. They both have a nonchalant, stick to themselves kind of attitude and they both think they don't deserve the gifts they've been given. If I had to compare a character in this book to one in real life, I'd probably compare Heather (the lawyer girlfriend) with my mom because they have the same personality. They both don't believe in something until they see definitive proof and they both bully the people close to them to show affection.
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So far in the story, the main character, George Orr, is introduced as neither an introverted or extroverted man. It opens with him trying to kill himself with extra pills he got by using other people's pharmacy cards. You meet two other characters, both of whom never come back after being introduced. He isn't charged or arrested but he is forced to attend a therapy session with the well-known doctor, William Haber. In Portland, Oregon, 2002, the world is extremely overpopulated and the majority of the population is starving or dying of disease. Orr discusses that in attempting to commit suicide he was trying to escape from his reality altering dreams. Haber doesn't believe him until he's given definitive evidence that Orr's dreams do, in fact, alter reality. He then begins to use hypnotic suggestion to get Orr to dream and change things that benefit him. This novel is one of the many dystopian novels I've read, and right away you can see many surface level connections to the real world. It takes place on Earth and takes place during 2002. Along with having the same location, it also focuses on problems that we focus on today, just on a much larger scale. For example, a running theme throughout this book is overpopulation, starvation, and disease. While we struggle with finding solutions to these problems, the author wrote Orr's ability to just dream it away. Another thing that is incorporated into this book is psychology and a sort of normality that balances out the strange idea of being able to change situations with your dreams. An example of this is how Dr.Haber argues with a lawyer or sees other patients for normal symptoms, all while running abnormal sleep experiments on Orr. This normality is something that connects the novel to real life. |
AuthorHi, I'm Elena Seitzinger and this is my blog! Welcome! Archives
June 2018
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