What if you could forget all your worries and cease to care? What if you could avoid all the stresses of being a teenager in high school, all the expectations teachers, parents, and society impose on you, and simply be free and careless? Would you decide to take action? Would you risk everything to have a permanent feeling of euphoria and liberty? Would it be worth it? In the fictional world Chuck Palahniuk creates in his short story “Zombie”, there is a way to make this happen. Nonetheless, this fictional world is not impossible, it is improbable.
One day, a high school student uses a defibrillator designed for cardiac use on his head instead, and fries his brains into oblivion. “He simply took the waxed paper off the gluey parts and pasted
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Its ontological status is improbable. There is a possibility of similar events occurring in our reality but it’s very unlikely to happen. According to Ryan, a literary scholar and critic, the basis of the theory of possible worlds is that the conceivable reality is actually a universe that consists of a number of worlds organized hierarchically with one element that occupies the center of the structure. “The foundation of PW theory is the idea that reality—conceived as the sum of the imaginable rather than as the sum of what exists physically—is a universe composed of a plurality of distinct worlds. This universe is hierarchically structured by the opposition of one element, which functions as the center of the system, to all the other members of the set (Ryan …show more content…
There aren’t impossible elements of fantasy in the story. There is no magic or anything unexplainable. The students use a commonly known and familiar medical device, and the consequences of their actions are drastic but imaginable, and quite possible. However, medically used defibrillators are designed to detect heartbeat and operate accordingly, but they can most definitely be tampered with.
Trevor’s uncle Henry was talking to his nephew about a proposed change in state law, “Officials want a 10-day waiting period on the sale of all heart defibrillators. They're talking about mandatory background checks and mental health screenings. But it's not the law, not yet (Palahniuk 2).” If the events in the story occurred in our world, in an actual high school then the media would be alerted and governments and official people would take action as soon as possible in order to stop more harm from coming to more people which makes the continued use of defibrillators in the story be considered
“Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.” Stated Abraham Lincoln. That quotes applies to Slaughterhouse-Five because even when you think you have conquered something and achieve the victory doesn’t mean that it will last long. Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim is non-heroic in the anti-war novel which makes the theme of the book Slaughterhouse-Five a man who is “unstuck” in time.
Kurt Vonnegut is the author of Slaughterhouse Five and he was a soldier during World War II. Slaughterhouse Five is a fictional story of what a man named Billy Pilgrim went through as a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II. Vonnegut experienced the bombing of Dresden in Germany when was a prisoner of war. Vonnegut's prison in Dresden, Germany was a slaughterhouse that the Germans forced the prisoners of war to live in. He relates some of his experiences during World War II to help him create the fictional story about Billy Pilgrim. Billy Pilgrim is a fictional character that Vonnegut created in order to somehow tell his store of Dresden. Most of Billy Pilgrim's experiences are similar to what Vonnegut actually experienced as a prisoner of war during World War II. PTSD is a disorder that disrupts someone's life keeping them from having an normal life because of a traumatic event that they experienced. PTSD is very common among soldiers returning from war because they went through many traumatic events during their deployment. It is very obvious to see that Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim are suffering from PTSD after their deployment in Germany during World War II.
The realm of myths and magic have captivated the attention of masses for decades. Most of the myths and creatures originated from folklore from diverse cultures around the world. The mythological world usually contains myths and stories about fantastic beasts, immortal gods and goddesses, unearthly beings, and bizarre creatures that rule or roam the depths of the earth. Since the rise of the internet, classic myths like mermaids, vampires, dragons, werewolves, zombies, and unicorns continue to have a certain appeal to the public. Due to this advancement of technology, myths like vampires and zombies can tap into people’s needs or yearnings. Either by filling a psychological need, symbolizing the rejected and inexpungable or by creating an
The threat of electroshock therapy is one that goes uncontested by the patients who have all seen the results of the therapy and have seen the brave and defiant patients like McMurphy, who are not subdued by marginalization like most of the patients, fall compliant or vegetative to the cruel control of the hospital. The amount of control and fear that is wielded against the patients makes them defenseless to dehumanization, which is experienced to extremes in the hospital. Bromden is even more vulnerable and targeted due to racism against Native Americans and Bromden’s facade of being deaf and dumb. The black boys in the hospital question how Bromden could’ve been signed up for the trip saying “Inniuns ain't able to write... What makes you think Inniuns able to read?” (Kesey 191). The dehumanization he experiences through racism is what roots and grows the idea in his mind that he is very weak and defenseless, so he could not resist or fight the oppression being held over him by the hospital similarly to how he couldn't fight the oppression or racism he faced out in the
When humankind turns directionless and destination less, when confusion confounds the society, when people act and react as if they are in world created out of hallucinations, when muddle-headed thinking becomes the accepted reasoning of lifestyles, take it for granted that they are the best candidates for and the ardent supporters of zombie consumerism. Phillip Mahoney in article Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Zombie: From Suggestion to Contagion in the book Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture (2011) writes “What is important is that, for now “zombie” effectively operates as an “empty signifier,” capable of calling into existence an active, global front dividing those who respond to the call—in “whatever” fashion—and those who do not”(p.126). This is a situation of fiasco and confrontation, created out of the gifts of the materialistic civilization, the mad race for aggrandizement for wealth and heading towards the purposeless goal of more and more purchases, whether an individual genuinely needs those commodities or not!
In communities throughout Contra Costa County in the state of California, several cities have experienced tragedies of teens that have died due to sudden cardiac death and lack of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) or defibrillator use. In December 2009, a 15 year-old Dairus Jones from Pittsburgh High School died after going into sudden cardiac arrest on the basketball court (Darius Jones Foundation, 2011) and in January 2010, 15-year-old Calvary Christian Academy student Joshua Ellison, of El Sobrante, died after collapsing at a basketball game (Contra Costa Times, 2010).
Have you ever experienced that feeling when your heart beat goes into hyper drive, your palms start to perspire, and your muscles tense up? Fear is an emotion that everyone has succumbed to at least once in their lifetime. Our fears are like our shadows, for they follow us around to wherever we may go. They are lingering in the back of our minds from the moment we wake up in the morning until our heads hit the pillow at night. Fears are so powerful, however, that they can even crawl into our dreams and manifest into other beings. We, as humans, like to put names or concepts to either faces or objects; we like to possess the ability to visualize what something or someone looks like. As a result, our fears are personified into monsters. Prolific essayist, Chuck Klosterman, points out how “Frankenstein’s monster illustrated our trepidation about untethered science” and “Godzilla was spawned from the fear of the atomic age.” In Klosterman’s article, “My Zombie, Myself: Why Modern Life Feels Rather Undead,” he tackles the
Baruch Spinoza once said “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” He compared free-will with destiny and ended up that what we live and what we think are all results of our destiny; and the concept of the free-will as humanity know is just the awareness of the situation. Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five explores this struggle between free-will and destiny, and illustrates the idea of time in order to demonstrate that there is no free-will in war; it is just destiny. Vonnegut conveys this through irony, symbolism and satire.
Introduction:The road to maturity and adulthood can be a long and difficult road for teens, especially when it comes to decision making and changing your view on the world. The popular short story, “On the Sidewalk Bleeding”, written by world-renowned author, Evan Hunter in 1957, displays this perfectly. Hunter uses the protagonist, Andy, to illustrate his development from adolescence into adulthood as he shifts from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge, from a mindset of idealism to realism and from a selfish personality to a selflessness personality. Hunter expresses the major theme of coming of age through this protagonist character who is seen shifting from a state of adolescence to a more matured state of adulthood throughout the story.
In Night of the Living Dead, the zombies were eventually eliminated. Or were they? Theorists argue that the monster’s elusiveness is due to its physical, psychological and social characteristics that cross the lines of classification. Human’s innate fear of the unknown is due to their inability to make a distinction or draw a clear conclusion. This is explained further in Jeffrey Cohen’s second thesis in “Monster Theory” that claims that; “the monster never escapes” (Cohen, 14). The zombie as a monster can never be destroyed completely and if it is, it leaves a remnant the make people feel uncertain of its destruction. Base on Cohen’s theory, the zombie’s different interpretation allows it to emerge in other forms (a faster, smarter zombie?)
ScreenPrism. "ScreenPrism." Why Did "Night of the Living Dead" Spark Controversy after Its Release. Web. 19 Sept. 2017.
...r can not be satisfied. The zombie is a consumer. Zombies are most often used as a metaphor these days for uncontrollable consumerism that plagues our generation. We blindly buy without thinking, either because of a low price, lust, or simply we just want more. We are guilty of “Zombie Consumerism”. Zombie consumerism is evident in George Romeros' film, Dawn of the Dead. In this movie, a shopping mall is where the characters take refuge and becomes the setting in which the humans stay in the battle of the zombies. They gorge themselves in free food and are delighted about having almost everything at their fingertips all to themselves. It sound's perfect. They can consume anything they want and they will be okay, forever. It is ironic then when there is nothing left and they must find new sources of shelter and food and resources, or become the resources themselves.
Chuck Palahniuk, born 1962 into a seemingly functional lifestyle, has made a name in the literary world over the last decade by magnifying the many facets of the human habits of dysfunction. After his first published novel, Fight Club, made waves in 1999, Palahniuk went on to take the fiction world by storm with novels such as Diary, Lullaby, Invisible Monsters, and several others, solidifying a reputation “as a skilled writer who continues to keep his readers uncomfortable” (“Chuck Palahniuk”). The author has also published two nonfiction works, but it is his fiction’s raw cynicism and his inability to be assigned to a genre that has made Palahniuk the success he is today. By many accounts, he struggled to find a path throughout his young life, holding jobs as everything from a dish washer to a movie projectionist, before finding success and sanity in the process of writing professionally (“Chuck Palahniuk”). Palahniuk’s ability to combine the intellectual and political with the disgusting, graphic, and degrading is what sets his writing apart from other satirists of the current literary scene. For example, in Haunted he uses a reality show gone wrong to create a picture of the shallow human condition. Similarly, in Invisible Monsters the reader follows the story of a former model, Shannon McFarland, who is missing the lower half of her face and a beautiful male-to-female transvestite, Brandy Alexander, as they make their way across the country to confront Shannon’s former best friend. Invisible Monsters was Palahniuk’s fictional depiction of the nonfiction world of the fashion industry and the impact it has on self image (“Chuck Palahniuk”). In this essay, I will be discussing Palahniuk’s least satirical fiction work, Lull...
Lidwell and Edgar H. Booth invented the first pacemaker. It was a portable device that consisting of two poles, one of which included a needle that would be plunged into a cardiac chamber. It was very crude, but it succeeded in reviving a stillborn baby at a Sydney hospital in 1928. The decades that followed, inventors came up with increasingly sophisticated versions of the pacemaker. However, these devices; which relied upon vacuum tubes; remained heavy and bulky, affording little or no mobility for patients. Colombian electrical engineer Jorge Reynolds Pombo developed a pacemaker in 1958 weighed 99 lbs and was powered by a 12-volt auto battery. Surgeons at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden were the first to place a fully implantable device into a patient in 1958. Rune Elmqvist and surgeon Ake Senning invented this pacemaker, which was implanted in the chest of Arne Larsson. The first device failed after three hours, the second after two days. Larsson would have 26 different pacemakers implanted in him. He died at the age of 86 in 2001, outliving both Elmqvist and Senning. In the world there are many heart attacks and as people grow they can get abnormalities in there heart(Medlineplus). When someone 's heart stops working it can be fixed with a pacemaker, it makes the heart beat properly. The artificial pacemaker is a wonder of modern science. A small, implantable device that regulates a human heartbeat through electrical impulses have saved millions of lives. The development of this vital medical device owes much to the advances in electronics and communications brought about by the Space Age.Pacemakers may be used for people who have heart problems that cause their heart to beat too slowly. A slow heartbeat is called Bradycardia two common problems that cause a slow heartbeat are sinus node disease and heart block. When your heart
In the article, “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism” by Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, the authors’ evaluate the idea of the zombie and its connection to capitalism and post-humanism. According to the authors, the zombie represents much more than just a fear, it represents a loss of oneself to many different things, primarily to a capitalist society. The authors have come to the conclusion that humans have a fear of what they cannot control, and that is why the zombie is so big in entertainment. We see zombies everywhere, in movies, books, tv shows, fundraisers, marathons, and so much more. They have been around for decades, but recently they have become very popular. The authors believe this is