Breakthrough Writer

1C The Reasons Too Many Choices Make Us Less Sane and Happy

1. There is always a nagging sense of that didn't make the right choice; in other words, we are plagued by doubt.
2. No matter what our choice, we always feel deprived. Deprivation is the paradoxical consequence of having too many choices.
3. We suffer from a sense of "false fill-up." Paradoxically, the more we fill up, the more empty we become.
4. We can't focus on a singular experience and suffer from "crossed signals" like eating too many desserts.
5. We cannot process the overwhelming amount of choices afforded by technology.
6. No matter our choice, it will become obsolete because of technology's rapid change.
7. Making the right choice requires enormous research on the scale of a full-time job.
8. Choices are often the result of novelty, not quality.
9. Choices are often based on impressing others, not the self.
10. We're always haunted by the idea that something better might come along but this "something better" proves to be an elusive chimera.

1A McMahon Commentary on George Saunders' "The New Mecca"

The prevailing mood of George Saunders' masterful essay "The New Mecca" is anguish, despair, and helplessness in the face of a false promise, the promise of false paradise characterized by a pseudo-religious ecstasy created by synthetic environments, the tantalization of infinite luxury, and the moral bankruptcy that accompanies hedonistic forgetfulness in which the Dubai patrons become so self-absorbed in their rhapsodic frenzy of consumerism that they ignore the suffering of the poor laborers who carry Dubai above their sagging, rickety shoulders. Saunders effectively captures the depravity of embracing the blind consumerism that is championed by the ambitious minions for whom Dubai is the apotheosis of garish materialism. The end result of Saunders' portrayal of consumer excess is a spiritual hangover, a merciless crash in which the patron, if he has a soul at all, will experience shame, guilt, emptiness, and ennui, a spiritual disease from which he may never recover.

1C Class Notes for Moral Absolutism

Moral absolutism and its deficiencies and fallacies

1.    MA is too abstract as it favors generalities and principles over real-life specifics. In other words the MA is incapable of compassion toward individuals as MA focuses on general principles. (Giving food to the poor but “not solving the problem,” according to a socialist relative)
2.    One rule fits all is a Procrustean nightmare. Look at case studies such as marriage and divorce or having children.  Or look at the fact that not all abortions are equal.
3.    MA fails to provide context but imposes MA on everything. See the film Les Miserables and the poor man who stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving family.
4.    Often people embrace MA in order to unleash their hatred and hostility toward others. Or they wish to dominate and bully others.
5.    MA fails to see the gray as everything is erroneously reduced to black and white. Again look at divorce.

Examples of moral principles that sound like absolutes until examined more closely:

1.    Compassion toward the poor is good. Right? Wrong. Studies show that helping poor can actually lead to more suffering and starvation.
2.    Divorce is bad. But what about an abusive spouse, a drug addict, a gambling addict? Are marriages with an addictive, philandering, abusive spouse viable?
3.    Honor they parents. But what if they steal your money and bring losers into the house that steal your money?
4.    Stealing is bad. But what if you steal to feed your starving children?
5.    Murder is bad. But what if you kill someone who molested your child?
6.    Torture is wrong. But what if torturing someone prevents a nuclear bomb from blowing up and killing tens of thousands of people?
7.    Marriage is generally a good thing. But what if you feel suffocated in a marriage no matter how loving your partner is?
8.    Hurting someone’s feelings is bad. But what if hurting someone’s feelings upfront spares them greater pain in the long-run. In this regard, Simon Cowell is compassionate or you are when you break things off quickly rather than letting them drag on.
9.    Therapy is generally a good thing for someone who needs it. But what if therapy simply compounds a person’s self-centeredness. Maybe they need something else.
10.    Cheating on your college exams but if everyone is doing it, the grading curve is inflated so that if you don’t cheat you are no longer competitive; other students’ cheating combined with your not cheating could prevent you from getting into UCLA or USC. What do you do?
11.    How important is your personal integrity? Let’s say you have limited job skills and you get a job at a gas station mini mart and all your co-workers shoplift. They want you to shoplift so that they’ll feel secure that you won’t rat on them. If you don’t shoplift, your co-workers make it clear they can do things that will get you fired and that will make your life very unpleasant. You have three children and a wife to feed. What do you do?
12.    Should you cheat on your taxes?
13.    Will you play God and create a genetically-enhanced Super Baby?
14.    Adultery is bad for individuals and society. But what about societies in the past where divorce wasn’t an option and people were enslaved to hellish marriages? Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Pet Dog” shows a compassionate attitude toward adultery. 

1C Lesson Plan for “Firelight” by Tobias Wolff (185)

Synopsis: A young boy and his single mother, living an impoverished, transitory existence, look for an upscale apartment, an endeavor that they can't afford but that feeds their fantasies of a better life, and the boy is transfixed by a family whom he idealizes as "perfect." Only far into the future when the boy grows up does he realize that the family, headed by a pompous elephantine professor, is dysfunctional in every grotesque way. He realizes he was projecting his own fantasies and turning the family into a false ideal, an illusion, also called a chimera. The chimera possesses us and intoxicates us with longings of fulfillment but always we crash and find ourselves overcome by REGRET.  The story's lesson is that when we elevate our expectations in unrealistic ways, allowing images to triumph over reality, we will inevitably be disillusioned, disenchanted, and DISAPPOINTED.
1.    What characterizes the squalor and transitory existence of the mother and son and how does this decrepitude influence their fantasy world? 185, 188
2.    Why is shopping so therapeutic to their self-esteem? 186, 187
3.    What does the story say about the dangers of the imagination? It’s addictive; it creates illusion of authority, stability, appeal, etc.
4.     How does the boy differ from his mother as evidenced at the bottom of page 189 and top of page 190?
5.    What is the “stagecraft” of Dr. Avery and his family?192, 193
6.    What things other than material goods can become “stagecraft”? The intellect, “culture,” “art,” etc.
7.    How does Dr. Avery reveal himself to be a fraud and a hypocrite on page 194?
8.    What is the metaphor of the firelight as evidenced on page 195?
9.     What is the story’s ambivalent theme toward keeping appearances as evidenced on page 195?
10.  How is Dr. Avery a form of “firelight” to his devoted wife? See page 195.
11. Explain the narrator’s adult life. 


Related Writing Assignment:

Third Option: Compare the chimera in Tobias Wolff's "Firelight" to the The Curse of the Chimera   and/or Chimera Case Study #2  on McMahon's website.

The Meaning of “Casualty”

The story is not so much about physical death but the different types of deaths we face when we lose certain types of illusions, as does B.D. Read page 27:

1.    His image of self as being courageous is gone for he realizes he is a coward.
2.    His image as a compassionate man is gone as he sees he can be calloused and apathetic.
3.    His image as a moral man is gone when he frequents prostitutes and realizes he is an immoral Billy goat.
4.    His image as a strong man is replaced with that of a “whiner.”
5.    His image as being loyal to friends is gone as he realizes self-preservations triumphs over all other interests.

Thus the story is dealing with the death of the self, in a spiritual or psychological sense, much more than it is dealing with physical death.

Category 1: You Lose Your Self-Respect

1.    Violating your integrity, what you know is right, for some short-term gain. B.D. goes to prostitutes.
2.    You betray your own allegiance to a certain moral code. For example, you are a young man seeing older men treating women badly, cheating on their girlfriends, treating women with contempt, living the lives of playboys, and so on. You’re so appalled by what you see and you swear that you will be better than that, that you will never treat women in such a profligate, insulting manner but you grow up and become the very playboy you once scorned. You realize the promises you make to yourself are empty and that you are shallow, hollow, and not worth the name that is stamped on your birth certificate. 
3.    Realizing that your self-preservation results in your betrayal of family or friends. Manipulating others for your own gain.
4.     Betrayal of a friend. You are too self-involved to intervene in a friend’s problem. Or you steal his girlfriend or on a smaller level you give his name and phone number to a telemarketer.
5.     Compromising your standards because of fear or laziness. Going out with someone you don’t really like for lack of other opportunities; taking a job for the same reason.
6.    No longer caring about your unhappiness because you’ve succumbed to learned helplessness.
7.    You’re no longer a welcome member of a certain group, community, or clique. For whatever reason, this group of people has rejected you and this results in self-doubt. You ask yourself, “What’s wrong with me? How could so many people be wrong?” Once having enjoyed a sense of belonging, you now feel banished from the pack. You’re an exile, a pariah, a leper.

Category 2: You Lose Your Mojo (charm, “magic,” passion for life and creativity)

1.    You fall out of love with your college major and face an abyss.
2.    You fall out of love with your girlfriend and acquire new girlfriends whom you’re not in love with either and you look in the mirror and feel empty.
3.    You lose your creativity and realize you’re no longer passionate about your work.
4.    You fall out of love with life itself. This is called ennui, a boredom for all of life.
5.    You lose the motivation to hang out with your friends and mope around and you can’t figure out what happened to you. All you know is that something has been lost. We call that your mojo. It may come back. It may not.
6.    Losing your mojo is not always a mystery. In many cases, it’s related to the loss of self-respect.

Category 3: You Lose Your Sense of Meaning and Order

1.    The world used to seem ordered and within your control and this gave you confidence, but something happens, a violent crime against you or your family, a physical affliction like some disease, perhaps cancer, and suddenly you feel helpless. The world is chaos.
2.    Someone you looked up to was very important because this admirable person was your role model and made you believe in values and morals and living a life of excellence and then this person becomes a fallen hero. This hero may even betray you. A pastor of a church steals church funds to pay for a mistress he’s had for several years. A governor who made his name prosecuting criminals is discovered to be a customer of an expensive prostitution ring of which he has spent eighty thousand dollars of government money.
3.    For reasons that are from within you or outside of you, you reach a point where life no longer has any meaning for you, which means you reach a point where you have nothing to lose. This is what we mean when we say “something is at stake.” To have stakes in life means to have things that you care about, things that are worth your care and discipline—could be maintaining a relationship you value, working toward a career, saving for a house. The point is you have something to lose, something is at stake. Not everyone has a stake in life. They have nothing and are beyond caring. This is a sort of death.
4.    You may have once believed that all suffering is a gift of God to teach us wisdom and to punish us for our sins and as such suffering has a corrective measure about it; suffering purifies us and gives us wisdom. But you may reach a point where you no longer have faith that suffering is a gift or punishment from God. You may reach the point in which you believe that most suffering is cruel and meaningless and as such you no longer believe in the religion that you were raised in. This is a sort of death.

1C McMahon Commentary on Tobias Wolff's "Mortals"

"Mortals," like many of Wolff's stories, seems to tell us that we are a pathetic race whose lives are unbearable without a certain degree of self-delusions to soothe us from our lives of banality, helplessness, vanity, and sheer terror. Specifically, Givens sees himself as a lugubrious chap, emasculated by his wife, generally disrespected by everyone, and sees his life as a feeble and useless one. His false obituary it seems is an attempt to resurrect his loathsome existence and transform him into Super Givens. Perhaps, Wolff's story is saying, we all carry a false obituary within us, a sort of self-aggrandizing version of our self, that tells us what we want to hear about ourselves: That we are good, that our lives are rich with meaning, that death cannot strip away the purpose of our vitality-filled lives. Moreover, we want to project our false obituaries, that is, our candy-coated versions of self, to others in order that we people admire us, not for who we really are but for the image people imagine us to be. This woeful condition is famously observed in Blaise Pascal's Pensees:

147. We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavor to shine. We labor unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.

1C Lesson Plan for “Casualty” by Tobias Wolff 14-32 and Using Parallelism in Thesis Statements

Part One: RYAN MUST DIE BECAUSE HE IS AN INCURABLE BIGMOUTH.

1.    What do we learn about B.D. in the story’s first paragraph? He is superstitious, a man dependent on rituals, a man who thrives on maintaining an illusion of order to make him feel safe. The war has made him consolidate all his energies to safety, even if those rituals he exercises having nothing to do with safety. As a result, he becomes over diligent and is mocked by his fellow troops.
2.    Why did B.D. and Ryan initially clash before forging their friendship? Ryan is an irrepressible prankster, jokester, and a  loudmouth, who cannot shut up even when it’s for his own good.
3.    Why does Ryan volunteer to ambush? Because he cannot pass up an opportunity for sarcasm, even if the sarcasm endangers his life. Ryan must mock authorities who don’t deserve their power.
4.    Does Ryan have any control over his compulsion to mock his sergeant? See page 21 and top of page 22.
5.    What is the main chimera or illusion in the story? See question #6.
6.    How does the title’s meaning extend beyond Ryan’s death? See page 27. The manner in which our self evolves has less to do with free will than we’d like to believe. In fact, there are environmental and biological hard-wired factors that overpower our free will. Thus the story is a meditation on the limits of free will as it acknowledges determinism. People go on American Idol, try to be jiu-jitsu fighters, professional baseball players, entrepreneurs, to name a few examples, but no matter how hard they try, they fail. Or we try to be a certain way and we fail. For example, we try to be less aggressive drivers but we lose our temper in spite of our resolve to do otherwise. A boy sees a bunch of playboys acting cruel against women and he says he’ll never be that way and he grows up to be just like them.
7.    We read that “B.D. concluded that grief was impossible to describe,” on page 30. Why is this ironic in the context of the story? Because the story achieves what B.D. could not. This is the story’s purpose.

Part Two: Parallelism and Sample thesis mapping components (noun followed by adjectival clause) come before the thesis:

Sample: Rendering the compulsions that overtake us, the unconscious that guides us unknowingly, and the incremental way we evolve into a person who defies our most noble aspirations, Tobias Wolff’s “Casualty” is a meditation on the limits of free will.

Sample: Here’s a thesis followed by mapping components (adjective followed by noun):
“Casualty” is a meditation on the limits of free will by virtue of being subject to irrepressible compulsions, an insidious unconscious, and a gradual evolution.

Part Three: Avoid Faulty Parallelism

In “Mortals” we encounter the narrator and Givens, two like-minded souls who suffer from vain self-delusion, obsessing over their lost entitlements, and pity themselves. (vain self-delusion, entitlement, and self-pity)

In “Mortals” the narrator hates Givens to distract himself from his own personal failings, which include squandering his existence on laziness, he won’t face his resignation to a mediocre life, and he is not happy that he is a failed writer.   (laziness, mediocrity, and self-pity)

Improved Thesis Statements that Correct the Faulty Parallelism:

“Mortals” is not a story about death or mortality; rather, it is a story about two failed lives, the narrator’s and Givens’, who, despising each other for their similarities, are both mired in self-pity and vain self-delusion alternated by grandiose bouts of self-pity.

The “resurrection” mentioned in the story is no resurrection at all; rather, it speaks to Givens’ desire to write his own obituary, for doing so enables him to gloss over his shortcomings, to exaggerate his strengths, and to impose an artificial narrative shape to his shapeless, meaningless existence.

Givens’ alleged “resurrection” is no resurrection at all. Rather, it is a chimera that enables him to gloss over his shortcomings, to exaggerate his strengths, and to impose an artificial narrative shape to his shapeless, meaningless existence.

The narrator is convinced that Givens called in his own obituary but in fact we have no definitive proof that Givens committed such a fraud. What is evident, however, is that the narrator is projecting his own failures onto Givens. These failures include a man who knows in his gut that he is squandering his existence on laziness, self-pity, and vain self-delusion and rather than face his shortcomings he would rather divert his energy to hating Givens.

1C Study Questions and Sample Thesis Statements for “Mortals” by Tobias Wolff

The narrator despises Givens but in fact despises a mirror reflection of himself because Givens, like him, is UNLOVEABLE.

1.    What psychological profile of the narrator can we glean from the story’s first 3 pages? See page 5.
2.    What “sin” is the narrator guilty of?
3.    What is the connection between the narrator’s boss discovering his employee’s negligence and the narrator’s discovery that his father had died on page 6? Death is like “getting caught”; it creates a nervous laughter, a coping mechanism to treat our vulnerabilities and shortcomings as a joke.
4.    How does the story divide the world into two groups on page 8? Those with a consciousness of death and those who don’t have such a consciousness.
5.    What is the story’s major theme? See page 8.
6.    What does the story say about having a healthy relationship with our own mortality? How can we turn this question into a thesis?
7.    What evidence is there that the narrator is disaffected and disconnected from the human race? See page 9.
8.    At the top of page 10, the narrator says to Givens: “Somebody’s imagining you dead. Thinking about it. The wish is father to the deed.” How are these words true?
9.    Clearly, the narrator suspects Givens to be the culprit of the fraud. But his contempt for Givens goes further. Explain.
10.    Find 3 similarities between the narrator and Givens. See page 10 and 11.
11.    What does the dialogue at the bottom of page 10 and the top of page 11 say about American notions of success and failure?
12.     Givens’ act of affirming his “loyalty” reveals what about him? Self-doubt.
13.    On page 12, the narrator says he admires Givens for having experienced a “resurrection.” Is this true? What is the story saying about the manner in which we “resurrect” ourselves? We impose narratives, real or otherwise, that give our lives a narrative arc, a shape, a structure, a meaning, that defies the chaos, emptiness, and failure that afflicts us. We all wish to write our own flattering obituary in other words. Our capacity for self-delusion is infinite.
14.    Is Givens’ confession the truth or simply uttered out of coercion?

Sample of Weak Thesis Statements That Suffer from Being Too Obvious or General:

“Mortals” is a story about death.

“Mortals” explores a man’s obsession with death.

Improved Thesis Statements:

“Mortals” is not a story about death or mortality; rather, it is a story about two failed lives, the narrator’s and Givens’, who, despising each other for their similarities, are both mired in self-pity and vain self-delusion alternated by grandiose bouts of self-pity. 

The “resurrection” mentioned in the story is no resurrection at all; rather, it speaks to Givens’ desire to write his own obituary, for doing so enables him to gloss over his shortcomings, to exaggerate his strengths, and to impose an artificial narrative shape to his shapeless, meaningless, and unloveable existence.

Givens’ alleged “resurrection” is no resurrection at all. Rather, it is a chimera that enables him to gloss over his shortcomings, to exaggerate his strengths, and to impose an artificial narrative shape to his shapeless, meaningless existence.

The narrator is convinced that Givens called in his own obituary but in fact we have no definitive proof that Givens committed such a fraud. What is evident, however, is that the narrator is projecting his own failures onto Givens. These failures include a man who knows in his gut that he is squandering his existence on laziness, self-pity, and vain self-delusion and rather than face his shortcomings he would rather divert his energy to hating Givens.

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