Briefing For A Descent Into Hell

The self is an entity that is almost impossible to keep pure and true to itself. While in that short- lived stage when innocence prevails over society, the self is able to develop the foundation of who you are going to be. By allowing this impartial, and most often unique expression of feelings, ideas, and emotions, a person is able to experience the purist form of life and all it has to offer with out guilt or shame, only the truth. The self is able to construct ideas and feelings through experiences entirely of its own. After that line of innocence is crossed, the desire to be true to one’s own self can be difficult. Because your individuality is exactly that, what makes you different from others, it may mean that you deviate from the norm of society. Society is an influence that people are forced to contend with everyday. Society is an ever- present factor in daily life. For Charles he was both the enforcer of society’s stipulations, as a Professor who taught the standards of societies in his anthropology lectures, and the obeyer of the standards by wearing the appropriate attire and using proper language. By achieving a norm, determined usually my the majority or the most powerful, a society can manipulate a person to conform to the ways of all the others. Sinbad really had no society to tell him what to wear or do, but he saw the manipulativeness of society while studying the animals. In the beginning the rat- dogs and the monkeys got along just fine, they lived in the same territories, shared the same food and water supplies, and “… it seemed as if both species recognized the right of the other to live in this place.” (78) but then as the monkeys were found insuperior to the rat- dogs, there became emotions such as jealousy and hatred, followed soon by fighting and killing. In this case society turned two species against each other by creating standards and prejudices. Society can be good as well as bad. A close society is able to rely on other members to help when in need for example Charles’ case. Charles, a member of society, was having a lot of trouble because of his amnesia, so the other members of society, the doctors and his friends and family, did everything in their power to return him to his good health. However some people grow too dependent on society and then they are no longer able to think for themselves and make decisions on their own.

Due to the amnesia Charles’ personality was forgotten, and Sinbad’s personality was formed. Like a newborn baby, Sinbad lived a lifestyle experiencing the bliss of innocence. The first few years of a lifetime are the most influential of them all, a state of uncensored innocence and being truly naive. After is friends were taken he got off the ship and onto a small raft that landed on an island. “There was no feeling of hostility towards the intruder in this place… I (Sinbad) felt welcome there, it was if this was a country where hostility or dislike had not yet been born.” (37) The foreign idea of hatred, made it impossible for the inhabitants to comprehend the feeling, and made it unfeasible to understand what it was like to know how to hate, therefore making it impossible to have a personality characteristic such as hatred or dislike. Sinbad says, “Each person is locked up inside his own skull, his own personal experience…” (129), meaning that you can only know what you have experienced, and that you wouldn’t be able to understand what you have never yourself experienced and known. The knowledge of right and wrong is a powerful thing. A baby can’t make the same choices as an adult because it doesn’t know the difference yet however once it gets the experience they will have the knowledge to do so. Innocence is one of the few things that cannot ever be returned. Once the realization of right and wrong is known, the innocence is gone.

Through the novel Lessing shows that once you realize how the two pressure

Some topics in this essay:
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