Faith is the driving force of life. Without faith, achieving anything is practically impossible. In Philip K Dick’s novel Ubik, the voice is convincing in terms of emotional power and in creating a deteriorating atmosphere of slow burning devotion. The narrator, Joe Chip faces several challenges where he has to follow the steps to figure out why the world is crumbling and exactly what it is that is still keeping him alive. Philip Dick constructs an incredible novel with the intentions of making ‘Ubik’ the savior of mankind. There can be no mistake that Philip K Dick is using Ubik as a metaphor for god. It establishes a sense of guide which may create a path to a new beginning.
One analyzing the novel may immediately wonder what “Ubik” is referring to and looking at it from a linguistic aspect, it comes from the word ubiquitous, “Ubik” means universal, everywhere, in other words, a divine being. Each passage in the novel starts with describing “Ubik” in different shapes and forms without exactly saying what it is. For instance, “Wild new Ubik salad dressing, not Italian not French but an entirely new and different taste that’s waking up the world. Wake up to Ubik and be wild! Safe when taken as directed” (36). “Not Italian, not French” refer to the concept that God, the divine right, does not have precise definition or origin. He is for every nationality, and for everybody. He is the one that’s “waking up the world”; this is directed toward how he is known as our father. He is there; ready to wake up everybody, to guide their day in the right direction. “Safe when taken as directed” is referring to the perception that people have. Majority of people have their own interpretation, and think they know exactly what God wants fro...
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...essentially by losing faith and hope.
Countless people are victims of losing hope and faith, in essence the divine right, God. When one loses faith, everything begins to deteriorate slowly, even the meaning of life. The readers begin to see such victims in Baltimore. An old lady waiting on line said, “It was dead”,
Works Cited
Drubach, Daniel A., and Daniel O. Claassen. "Perception And The Awareness Of God: The
Importance Of Neuronal Habituation In The Context Of The Jewish And Christian Faiths."
Journal Of Religion & Health 47.4 (2008): 541-548. Academic Search Complete. Web. 27
Apr. 2014.
Grzesik, Tadeusz. "Faith And Conscience--The Surest Of Arguments For The Existence Of
God." Forum Philosophicum: International Journal For Philosophy 17.2 (2012): 245-268.
Academic Search Complete. Web. 27 Apr. 2014.
Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium Is the Message"
While reading Amazing Grace, one is unable to escape the seemingly endless tales of hardship and pain. The setting behind this gripping story is the South Bronx of New York City, with the main focus on the Mott Haven housing project and its surrounding neighborhood. Here black and Hispanic families try to cope with the disparity that surrounds them. Mott Haven is a place where children must place in the hallways of the building, because playing outside is to much of a risk. The building is filled with rats and cockroaches in the summer, and lacks heat and decent water in the winter. This picture of the "ghetto" is not one of hope, but one of fear. Even the hospitals servicing the neighborhoods are dirty and lack the staff that is needed for quality basic care. If clean bed sheets are needed the patients must put them on themselves. This book is filled with stories of real people and their struggles. Each story, though different in content, has the same basic point, survival.
Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner refuse to surrender to the temptation of writing fanciful stories where the hero defeats the villain and everyone lives happily ever after. Instead, these two writers reveal realistic portrayals of death and the downfall of man. Remarkably, O’Connor and Faulkner’s most emotionally degraded characters fail to believe that an omnipotent deity controls their fate. This belief directly correlates to the characters’ inability to follow a strict set of morals or value human life. On the other hand, one might expect Faulkner and O’Connor’s “Christian” characters to starkly contrast the vile heathens who deny the existence of God. However, these characters struggle to follow their own standards of morality.
Mythology has been present throughout human civilization to provide a sense of awe, wonder, and fear. According to Joseph Campbell’s The Need for New Myths, a myth offers gratitude or rapture to reveal a comprehensive image of man’s universe and his place within the world. In the novel Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, magic and religion reassemble human struggles into a relatable, yet awe inducing myth. The sensation of wonder, surprise, or fear induces a feeling of self-insignificance at the vastness of the universe. To accommodate for this overwhelming experience, a person undergoes catharsis where their mental schemata is reset. In this release of emotions, one accepts their place in the universe and becomes a better self. Dunstan and Paul rely on religion and magic for the mending of a traumatized childhood. The reenactment of the Christian Faust legend in the magic act portrays the eternal struggle of good versus evil in humanity. Eisengrim, as an allusion to Jesus, provides wonder and release to his audience. In Fifth Business, Magic and religion both reconstruct everyday experiences to provide catharsis in wonder.
The argument Carver touched on in the “Cathedral” is the religiously blind versus the physical blind. Carver brings this into order by showing how religious blindness of today’s world looks more at the physical side rather than looking more into the topic. “one night she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that moving-around life. She got to feeling she the couldn'...
C.S. Lewis was the 20th century’s most popular proponent of faith based on reason. As a child, he created an imaginary world where personified animals came to life, and later, he wrote the book, Chronicles of Narnia. How did he transform from a boy fascinated with anthropomorphic animals into a man of immense faith? His transformation to the Christian religion happened as his fame began to flourish. People wrote him, asking him about his claims about the truth of Christianity (Belmonte, Kevin). As I attended the drama of Freud’s Last Session, I was engrossed into the plot of the play and was constantly thinking about how it pertained to the objectives of the World Literature class. I not only connected the content of the play to its context, but I also reached out to apply the context to a discussion on a broader scale. I then discovered why the context of literature is imperative for true understanding of the w...
To begin with, one important character in this book, Joseph Strorm, believes that everyone in Waknuk should look according to “The Definition of Man,” but this “perfection” definition means the loss of strong values humans need in their everyday life. The Definition of Man is how people in Waknuk believe every human should look like. Firstly, Joseph Strorm was a man that followed religion above ever...
In the post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, a man and his son travel south through the ruins and ash of their demolished home. Crippled by fear, starvation, and loneliness, the man and his son struggle to maintain physical, mental, and emotion health. Throughout the novel, the characters remain unnamed, with little description of their physical appearance. The man shares all of his beliefs, memories, qualms, and feelings through his thoughts and conversations with the boy. The man has many compelling convictions referencing The Holy Bible and his unwavering belief in God. However, these accounts often contradict each other. Throughout the novel, the existence of God is indefinite. The ambiguity of the novel relates to the ambiguity of God’s existence; the characters are left in the dark about what is to come throughout their journey, just as they are left to wonder whether God’s light is illuminated or diminished among the wreckage of their forgotten world.
the power of faith are developed and can be used to show the problems in today’s culture.
In the short story “A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets”, the author uses symbols of faith, magical elements, and realistic struggles to divulge the morals and struggles of life. Faith is one thing many people take for granted and one reason why many people cannot complete any tasks in the life they live. Faith is something that one must have everyday to get through life and the overwhelming obstacles it may spit out. Faith is not always easy, but it makes life richer and gives us something to live up to.
Theme in “Defender of the Faith” can be interpreted in many varying ways, some of which are life-long lessons and others to the relation between faith and the individual.
Often when a person suffers through a tragic loss of a loved one in his or her life they never fully recover to move on. Death is one of hardest experiences a person in life ever goes through. Only the strong minded people are the ones that are able to move on from it whereas the weak ones never recover from the loss of a loved one. In the novel The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks, character Billy Ansel – having lost his family serves as the best example of brokenness after experiencing death. Whether it is turning to substance abuse, using his memory to escape reality or using Risa Walker as a sexual escape, Billy Ansel never fully recovers from the death of his twins and his wife. This close analysis of Billy’s struggle with death becomes an important lesson for all readers. When dealing with tragedies humans believe they have the moral strength to handle them and move on by themselves but, what they do not realize is that they need someone by their side to help them overcome death. Using unhealthy coping mechanism only leads to life full of grief and depression.
Screwtape explains to Wormwood how easily humans are distracted from “the Enemy”, who from the demons’ viewpoint is God, through the material world around us. By emphasizing the theme of temptation throughout the book, Lewis makes the reader realize how easily the material world distracts us from God and keeps our attention diverted from Him. In speaking through the demon letters, Lewis helps his audience to combat temptations by understanding the methods that the devil uses to fight Christianity.
Racism in the United States is without a doubt one of the most gruesome forms of inhumanity. This disease generated the dehumanization of slavery which has taken the lives of innumerable innocent African Americans. It has also robbed a whole race of their identities, heritages and cultures. Throughout the myriad of novels, excerpts, poems, videos and other forms of literature that we encountered in this course, it is unmistakable that the African American literary tradition demonstrates that the past (the unbelievable sufferings of African Americans) can never be arrested and forgotten. The many that have perished at the feet of racism are the history of African Americans themselves, and the African American literary tradition makes it a priority to be true to that history. So why is death a theme in the African American literary tradition? Death, in itself, is a universal phenomenon, with no exception; it touches the lives of all persons regardless of their social status or ethnic heritage. Likewise, death is a universal theme in literature, but its relevance in the African American literature is particularly poignant because of the loyalty that African American writers have to their history. With the help of works of Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave , Negro spirituals (“I feel like my time ain’t long” and “Many Thousands Gone”) and Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruits,” modern African American literature like late sermons from Martine Luther King Jr. and Elizabeth Alexander’s “ Praise Song for the Day” has utilize the universal theme of death to symbolize the racial injustice that African Americans experience in the own country and they also utilize such a strong theme to declare ...
Evidence of an American society alienating children due to racism only breeds more racism. This is why children living in the Bronx already face enough hardships while growing up and do not need the addition of racial segregation. In Martin Luther King’s response to the letter from Birmingham, “all segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.” (Module, 11c) The readers of Amazing Grace have seen the children’s personality damaged and soul distorted. The role of religion is to comfort the children through these hard times.
St. Ignatius of Loyola was a Jesuit priest during 1500s the that developed the Spiritual Exercises. The Spiritual Exercises is a series of rules that is intended to be a guide or manual for those on a retreat. The manual provides its audience with guidance and encouragement to discover their purpose, their "True Self" and path in which they want to travel in life. St. Ignatius's goal for his set of prayers, Spiritual Exercises, is to freely choose to follow God and to serve Him.