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Karthik A. ENG 348W F22 - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Conspiracy theories are rampant throughout the Gernsback Continuum, especially so with Merv Kihn, being interested in UFO sightings, the Lochness Monster, etc.
      - Alternatively, the concept of mass unconsciousness plays a big role in the narrator's story, which further emphasizes not just a truth being manifested, but rather the population collectively accepting it being the way a manifested truth turns into what we see as our reality, even with someone like Merv Kihn who is trying his best to get rid of a manifested truth from his consciousness
  - - - Nazi-inspired architecture and its "perfection"
      - Aryan-inspired style and look of human beings in the alternate reality
      - Our past hopes for a future
    - - THE CHANGING IDEALS OF ARCHITECTURE
- - - - Beloved and her control over Sethe
        
        Sethe faces internal turmoil and confusion for killing her own daughter to prevent her from living life as a slave like she did
      - Denver: She turns into an entirely different person after being haunted by Beloved
      - Fear of loving something only to lose it, as with Sethe's children: she is haunted by this loss and as such is afraid to love again
        
        Paul D as well: Having sex with Beloved and seeing a human heart
        
        "In that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut." Paul D's memories prevent him from loving, and is also fearful that revealing too much about his past to Sethe will transport both of them back to the plantation
        
        Paul D: Does not love all the way as much as he would like to, since he does not want to have to lose someone he loves so much
        
        "She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them": Paul D reaction to finding out about Sethe and her murdering her daughter, since he feels a certain way towards Beloved
    - - Comparing freeing oneself and the actual free life: they are very different and create very different feelings
      - Sethe's decision to provide without any consideration of her own well being: she has no self-dependency or self-importance, and lives only to protect her children from her own past
      - Sethe wants her children to only understand freedom, and as such she is strained by this desire and forced to commit acts to protect them
  - - - The Past
        
        Sethe
        
        Beloved having control of Sethe in all manners
        
        Sethe was conceived in an act of rape
        
        The turning back in her bed on her husband - representing how she her past
        
        The tree, and the treatment she faced by her teacher, and the trauma it has caused her
        
        The "animal characteristics" she is described with by her teacher
        
        Sethe is really only able to "live" and be free when she disassociates her current self from her past self
        
        Sethe's view of herself as different from the other black people that she lives around
        
        Stealing food from her restaurant where she works
        
        Getting beat with the tree and cowhide while pregnant
        
        Paul D
        
        Paul D looking at Sethe's back when she sleeps, only seeing her for what she was and not what she is now
      - Tendency to forget traumatic experiences, but having them linger and impact the characters
  - - - Sethe killing Beloved and trying to kill her other children to save them
      - Baby Suggs and Sethe collectively shunned by their neighbors
      - Ignoring her trauma for the sake of her children, protecting them from anything she had ot endure
    - - Feeling tortured as she had her milk stolen from her, not caring about the abuse she faced
      - The mother-child relationship, breast-feeding, and how her dependence on milk represents her desire to protect her children from her past
        
        Sethe and Denver: Sethe's necessity to feed Denver, her child: "All I knew is that I had to get my milk to my baby girl"
  - - - Having no companionship within a Black community negatively affects Sethe, Denver, and Paul D: The hauntings of Beloved
    - - Beloved consumes Sethe
        
        The only way Beloved is even exorcised from 124 is through the collective community
- - - - “Me, nothing really weighed on me, nothing unique. Me, I held down an office job and fiddled around with some photography when the moon hit the Gowanus right. Or something like that, the usual ways of justifying your life, of passing time” (11).
    - - Candace's Bibles: They are just something to sell for her, no longer a valuable item
        
        Candace talking about the Bible without referencing its content or its religious impact (67)
      - Gemstone Bibles production: No consideration of the consequences of health problems facing workers producing them
      - The Bible is the best "selling" book every year being Candace's praise of it rather than its history or impact
    - - Losing herself in her work (23)
      - "You're under the impression that everyone gets to do what they want for a living" (275) - Candace isn't really passionate about what she does, but just does to to get by and pass the time
      - She still gets up everyday to go to work - even when there is an apocalypse going on - she is tied to her routine and system
    - - Sending money earned from capitalist jobs and benefitting from the system back home to families
      - Bible Production: Having the map on the back of the Bible was their only concern, specifically in terms of sales and production
      - The Shenzen Hotel: In China but made specifically to represent western standards of architecture and design
      - The influence of Candace's parents on her life: Her values, relationships, ideas, willingness to work at her job, culminating into her daily routine: Even things such as skin care are done in the exact same way day in and day out for Candace
  - - - Killing someone over time: This regularity we seek is in fact killing us mentally
      - Candace pretty much feels dead as an individual, but she was not born that way
      - Someone killing and/or being killed is rarely just related to that moment, there is issues and other things leading up to it, that will cause these acts to occur
    - - At the same time, Candace loses her "autonomy" to her child, even in the apocalypse, which plays into why she can't talk about her excitement with others, she is essentially now a servant for her child instead of a servant for herself (166)
      - Candace can't talk to anyone about her feelings or emotions in regard to becoming pregnant/a mother
    - - Capitalist Structures commanding our lives
- - - - Willingness and excitement with which the group kills
        
        (Page 46) Very casual descriptions of dead bodies and murders
        
        The Judge's view on life as pointless and exaggerations of training Children to kill (Page 141)
    - - Casual murder descriptions
      - Murders become decreasingly descriptive, and rather mundane as the story progresses, ending life becomes a formality
    - - Referring to Mexcians and tribes as inferior in many forms
        
        The John Jackson dilemma within the group itself
    - - Scalping for money, taking away any value of life
  - - - War is permanent
        
        "Joking" about mandatorily training kids from a young age to fight
        
        The Judge describing war as "devine"
      - Godly representations
        
        God speaking through stones/trees
        
        Hearing God's voice
        
        God would have interfered if he did not agree with the degeneracy of war
      - Despite some sympathy for children, he kills them regardless
      - The people you hang around, and their loyalty and companionship to others
        
        The kid: He ends up disagreeing fundamentally with The Judge but when given the choice to kill him, he decides to let him live
      - His innate fear of change and the future: He is tied to war and violence and will do anything to maintain that lifestyle
  - - - Description of the desert as an alien type landscape
      - The different ruins they come across are always described in different manners
      - The descriptions of each tribe that is pillaged
    - - Descriptions used for the sun (inescapable, white noon, sun showing the blood rushing inside the characters) to provide a sense of impact on that characters
      - The moon and the night: Moving, shaking, "wearing shapes"
      - The feeling of being "enslaved" by nature, having to alter every move and abide by nature's rules, and nature can be ruthless especially in the desert
- - - - Murder of JFK being fake: Is Lee Harvey Oswald a villain or an American hero for serving in the military?
      - JFK: Him and his family are going to now be seen in a completely different light after the theory is debunked, are they actually heroic or making America "great"?
      - Are American Values really benefiting the people, or are they in place to mainly benefit others, like the elites and powerful people?
        
        Conspiracies can allow for the elites to be protected from any ridicule in this way, which is why it seems that the DoT even exists, to make sure that the ideas that protect the elites are the ideas that are most widely believed, to keep the general population unaware of what is really going on
        
        The concept of the "tulpas" that are brought up, as things that describe the impossible things that are brought to life through belief - as long as the elites benefit from the tulpas, the DoT and other government powers are okay with them existing
- - - - "You think whites are just afraid of Black men? I think it's sport"
    - - Being a black cop is a complicated role: We can see their inner dilemma when they are investigating the double homicide
  - - - "I seen him, seen him close up, scarred up by Satan himself" (108)
      - Calling themselves "Whites for Social Justice" is incredibly ironic considering the time, and what social justice means now: instead they are banding together to avenge for dead white people who are ancestors of lynchers
    - - "Chief, is clusterfuck one word or two?" (31)
    - - "Charlene thumbed through the Popular Mechanics magazines and tried to eavesdrop. She looked at the science magazine instead of People. She hated them intellectual elites in People." (79)
    - - "Well, it's chock-full of know-nothing peckerwoods stuck in the prewar nineteenth century and living proof that inbreeding does not lead to extinction." (120) - Jim and Ed's description of Money, Mississippi reflects the common idea about a rural town in the South, known for hosting KKK meetings, lynchings in the past, and being the most racist places in America
  - - - "I wronged the little pickaninny. Like it say in the good book, what goes around come around" (13)
    - - These deaths are a huge cause of concern for the town population, but unfortunately act as a mechanism to plant deeper rooted racist values
      - "He found it all depressing, not that lynching could be anything but. However, the crime, the practice, the religion of it, was becoming more pernicious as he realized that the similarity of their deaths had caused these men and women to be at once erased and coalesced like one piece, like one body. They were all number and no number at all, many and one, a symptom, a sign." (189)
        
        How much do we let the past impact us: And under what circumstances is it ok (e.g., oppression, racism, targeted violence, and the trauma resulting from these things
    - - Even then, the vengeance killings done give the white families the opportunity to say that they were simply right all along, and that the true villains are black people
  - - - "You should know I consider police killings to be lynchings."