Blog 1: The Invention of Morel

On the first day of class I was sitting in my seat, dreading what I was about to have to endure for an entire quarter. After viewing the syllabus I had no idea how I would survive. Not only did I feel as though the plurk and blog aspects of this course would go right over my head, I also feared that this would be another English class filled with novels that I would not be able to follow or that I would have to fight with to stay awake. It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading, but this was my first college English course that was not purely writing. I’ve been able to only read for pleasure since high school, so needless to say I did not expect much when opening up The Invention of Morel.
Once I got my blog set up, my confidence level for the course rose dramatically. Once I emailed the professor and he told me to breathe, I really felt a lot better. After reading the first half of The Invention of Morel, I was actually excited. Surprisingly, the novel was keeping me at the edge of my seat. I was first drawn in my a few quotes from just the introduction and prologue. Throughout the entire novel there are very thought provoking points. Besides this, the novel kept me interested with the mystery, confusion, and hope. Now that I feel 100 times more ready for this course, I just with Plurk.com would load on my lap top…
I will begin with what drew me into this novel. Page viii states, “The body is imaginary, and we bow to the tyranny of a phantom. Love is a privilege perception, the most total and lucid not only of the unreality of the world but of our own unreality: not only do we traverse a realm of shadows; but ourselves are shadows.” What a better way of putting saying that one quote “it is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.” The novels way makes you understand why. Love really is a privilege and something that anyone should be lucky to experience. Anyone who has loved and lost, which I believe I have, can admit how much of a privilege love is. Love makes you feel as though the world is at your feet and everything makes sense. The introduction further explained that the author likes to “make both the protagonist and reader painfully aware of solitude, and of the pathetic, tragic, and yet comic ways in which lovers lose one another, and the impossibility of being the heroic master of one’s destiny.” At this point I was hooked. It seems as though every day I think about how beautiful love can be, how tragic love can be, how pathetic people in love can act, and how funny it all really is. I knew that not only I was about to gain a lot of knowledge about love, but that I was about to gain a lot of knowledge about the beauty of solitude. I could go on for pages about just what I have learned from the first 40 some pages of this book, but maybe I should get more into that in my next blog. For now I should probably get more into the characters.
At this point in time I have three theories for the narrator. My first theory is that he is completely insane; however this is only plausible if he is imagining or hallucinating every person he encounters. If the people are actually there, then my theory is that in fact he has been dead for a few years and still convinced that he is alive and hiding. I think that there is a great possibility that he killed himself years ago. My only other theory could be that he is in some sort of afterlife, most likely hell or purgatory. I’m pretty sure my second theory is the one that will play out, however I really hope that none of my theories are correct and I will be completely shocked at the end and feel like an idiot.
I am also very curious as to what the narrator did to have the police chasing after him. On page 34 he states, “I am in a bad state of mind. It seems that for a long time I have known that everything I do is wrong, and yet I have kept the same way, stupidly, obstinately. I might have acted this way in a dream, or if I were insane.” I suppose that could add a fourth theory that he is dreaming, but that seems too easy too. What comes next in the paragraph is what helped me form theory two. He says, “…I had this dream, like a symbolic and premature commentary on my life: as I was playing a game of croquet, I learned that my part in the game was killing a man. Then suddenly, I knew I was that man.” At this point, I began to wonder if in his head the police are chasing after him for killing a man; therefore he is in hiding on this island. In reality, the man he killed is himself, and he is actually living death. It also seems impossible that this man is still alive.
When I first was reading this novel I was convinced that he was simply insane. There are dozens of examples of where he could be insane. From him exploring this museum which seems to be made up in his head, to him hearing footsteps or voices, to him planting a garden that is sure to blow away or get taken by the ocean, to him believing that this woman is just messing with him when clearly she must not see him. It wasn’t until the woman was brought into the novel that I was convinced there is no way he is alive. When he began suggesting what he could write in his gardgen, I got another feeling that he was dead. He was debating between, “You have kept a dead man on this island from sleeping,” “I am no longer dead: I am in love” and “You have awakened me from a living death on this island.” Perhaps this man is such a romantic that he is hoping love will bring him alive again. In that case, maybe we can combine my first and second theories, in that he is insane and dead. I can’t wait to see how this plays out!