Period 4
May 18, 2012
MLA Essay
Trapped
Reality only stretches as far as the eye can see. What somebody perceives is their own reality. In Brave New World, Siddhartha, The Tragedy of Macbeth, “The Truman Show”, Sonnet 130, “Plato: Book VII of The Republic: The Allegory of the Cave”, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Anthem, “Harriet Tubman” and “Collective Wage Bargaining” how people’s realities are a combination of what they cannot control and what they choose to discover is depicted through metaphor, irony, foreshadowing, diction, point of view, and historical context. People are controlled like puppets and can only choose to free themselves if they realize they are enslaved.
Firstly, people are prisoners, sheltered from reality. “Slowly, majestically, with a faint humming of machinery, the conveyors move forward, thirty three centimeters an hour. In the red darkness glinted innumerable rubies” (Huxley 242). At birth, the embryos in the World State are bottled. The World Controllers continue confining the embryos as they grow. When I read this passage, I thought about how sometimes I feel trapped by how my grandparents treat me. Similarly, “Siddhartha spent his youth in great luxury. He was sheltered from the pain and suffering that lay just outside of his father’s court” (Hesse 5). All his life, Siddhartha was son of a Brahmin. His father was a high priest, and the life he led was filled with luxury. He was sheltered from knowing about old age and death. Ironically, while trying to shelter Siddhartha from knowing about old age and death, his father was making him ignorant. When I read this passage, I thought about all the things my grandparents had never taught me that I had learned from other people. It made me curious as to why they would try to hide things from me.
Secondly, people are all manipulated puppets of a puppeteer they cannot see. When Macbeth heard “All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter” (Macbeth I,
Cited: "Collective Wage Bargaining." Encyclopedia of Governance. Vol. 1. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Reference, 2007. 112-113. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 19 May 2012. Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. New York: New Directions, 1951. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Perf. Robert De Niro, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hulce, Helena Bonham Carter. TriStar Pictures, 1994. DVD. Plato: Book VII of The Republic: The Allegory of the Cave. eLibrary. Web. 21 May. 2012. Rand, Ayn. Anthem. New York: Dutton, 1995. Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 130”. Prentice Hall Literature. Ed. Kate Kinsella, et al. New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc., 2002 The Truman Show. Dir. Peter Weir. Perf. Jim Carey, Laura Linney, Ed Harris, Noah Emmerich, Natasha McElhone. Paramount Pictures, 1998. DVD.