Thoughts on 1984 and Parable of the Sower

It's concerning how nonchalantly the characters in Parable talk about rape. The word "rape" is found in the book just 12 times, and all of those instances involve Lauren or someone else briefly mentioning rape before swiftly moving on. The characters acknowledge that rape is happening, but they never make a big deal out of it, just treating it like another bad thing that happens in the world. On page 9 in the book, Lauren sees a woman staggering along the streets outside of the walls and speculates that "she had been raped so much that she was crazy". Lauren seems indifferent to how cruel and sadistic such an act is, merely commenting casually that she had heard stories of such incidents before. When Mrs. Sims's house gets robbed and Mrs. Sims is raped by the robbers, Lauren seems more shocked at the fact that the robbers would rape an old woman than the fact that Mrs. Sims was raped in the first place. Rape has become so commonplace in Parable's world t...

Did you know there's a graphic novel adaptation of Parable of the Sower? It looks really cool! Here's the cover: 

I just read through The Parable of the Sower in the Bible, and I think I can make some comparisons between it and the book of the same name. I won't summarize the passage, so here's the link if you want to read it:  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2013&version=NIV The parable describes a farmer sowing seed. I think this represents Lauren talking about her newly discovered religion, first to Joanne and her father, and later to Harry, Zahra, and the other members of her group. Lauren is sowing the seed of her religion in these people. Joanne and Lauren's father's reactions to hearing about Earthseed are ones of dismissal and scorn. Joanne insists that the preparations Lauren is suggesting are useless and won't matter, and Lauren's father says that Lauren is too young to fully understand the world. These two are similar to the seeds that fell on the path and were eaten by birds. They listen to Lauren's words, but don't properly cons...

After reading Chapter 19, I have to say that I don't really trust Bankole. I find his introduction to Lauren's group suspicious. Bankole just suddenly appeared next to the group and started talking to them, without giving a reason for doing so. He also doesn't have a clear motive for joining the group, unlike Travis and Natividad, who joined after the group saved the pair from thieves. Lauren feels a connection to Bankole because of their names, but that connection is fairly superficial and, in my opinion, shouldn't warrant the lack of suspicion she shows toward him. Bankole does seem friendly toward the group and helps them rescue Allie and Jill, but it's possible that this is an act. He could be trying to gain enough trust to get a solitary watch and steal from the group during it, or exploit the group's trust in some other way. Regardless of how Lauren feels about Bankole, I will definitely be keeping an eye on his actions in the following chapters.

We've talked a bit in class about the purpose of Lauren's hyperempathy, and I wanted to share some of my ideas. I see hyperempathy as creating a conflict for Lauren: either stay in her sheltered community where she rarely has to share other people's pain, or live her desired life on the streets but be forced to feel others' suffering much more often. As it stands, Lauren's condition is preventing her from acting in accordance with Earthseed by escaping her stagnating neighborhood. This issue could lead Lauren to try and suppress her hyperempathy, but I think doing this would also contradict Earthseed's core principle of change. By making Lauren feel the pain of the poor and starving people outside of her community's walls every time she sees them, her hyperempathy forces her to confront the reality of the changing world and encourages her to adapt to these changes instead of denying them. If Lauren tried to repress her hyperempathy, she would essentially be ...

So I found an interesting parallel between Mrs. Sims and the astronaut Lauren talks about in Chapter 3.  Mrs. Sims believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible, and she thought that people who killed themselves would go to hell forever. Lauren says that Mrs. Sims also considered herself morally superior to most other people, so it is reasonable to assume that, before the house fire killed her family, Mrs. Sims believed she was going to heaven when she died. However, we learn that Mrs. Sims shot herself in the aftermath of the fire, sending herself to hell and denying herself the heaven that she believed in.  The astronaut who died on Mars was also denied her personal heaven. In her last moments, she expressed a desire to be buried on Mars because she wanted to be a part of the planet forever. However, her body was brought back to Earth due to concern that it would become a contaminant, thus taking the astronaut away from the resting place she had chosen. I'm not sure what...