Mrs. Sims and the astronaut

-

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 to make of this similarity; is it just an insignificant detail, or is it some kind of foreshadowing for the rest of the book? What do you think?

Comments

  1. L. MoffittMay 20, 2021 at 10:59 AM

    Intriguing. I hadn't thought of that parallel. Both are denied their heaven. Maybe that's a denial of heaven altogether. You don't get closure in this world. Yet also there's irony in the idea that the astronaut would have "contaminated" Mars and yet Lauren believes human destiny is to go out into space. She clearly doesn't see us as a contaminant but as seeds?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rape in 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...
Read more

Parallels between the Party and the UDC

-
The Party constantly changing records of the past to make Big Brother and certain Ministries look good reminds me of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and their efforts to make the Southern cause during the Civil War seem heroic. After the Civil War ended, the UDC essentially tried to rewrite history in the Southern U.S., funding the creation of monuments that commemorated Confederate leaders, forming textbook review committees that rejected history textbooks for even hinting at criticizing the South, and even writing their own textbooks. For an example of the strict rules that the UDC used when examining textbooks, take the pamphlet “A Measuring Rod for Textbooks”, in which the author, a member of the UDC, tells schools to reject any textbook that calls the Civil War a rebellion or calls Confederate soldiers rebels. This organization wanted to remove all mention of the Confederacy being in the wrong, much like how the Party in 1984 rewrites their records to make all their ...
Read more