Part One: Explain the title “Back in the World”
Part Two. Lexicon
1. Decrepitude (weakened, broken down, the condition of both brothers)
2. hubris
3. braggadocio
4. culpability
5. symbiosis
6. passive-aggressive
7. scapegoat
8. sibling rivalry
9. stagnation
10. status quo
11. spite—an impulse for revenge that hurts you more than the person you hate.
12. Insanity— doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein)
13. centrifugal
14. centripetal
(Student activity: Find the flaws in both characters)
Part Three. Pete’s 6 Moral Flaws
1. He worships money, seeing it as a solution for everything.
2. He suffers from a brand of obnoxious smug pride rooted in his wealth. (“Grow up and get a Mercedes.”) In fact, Pete is not rich at all as evidenced by the story’s ironic title “The Rich Brother.” Pete in fact is anything but “rich.” He is impoverished by his condition of helplessness and moral decrepitude. Pete covers his flaws with a pose of hubris and braggadocio.
3. He sees things only at face value without digging deeper because he is afraid of what he will find.
4. He is afraid to confront his culpability for the past, namely, his role in hating on his brother Donald through his rivalry and blind ambition.
5. Pete is a liar to his brother and to himself. For example on page 197 he lies about his dreams, claiming he only dreams about sex and money when in fact he is haunted by guilt for the sins he once committed against Donald. On 199 and 200 we find that Pete tried to kill his brother after an operation because he was jealous of the way his mother doted on Donald. Ironically, now it’s Pete who dotes on Donald and in doing so he assures that he keeps Donald crippled, which is to his advantage, or so he seeks.
6. He is afraid to confront his current role as Donald’s “mother,” which is ironic since he in a way attempted to steal Donald’s mother from him. In other words, Pete is dependent on Donald being dependent on him. What we have here, then, are two brothers trapped in a snake grip of hatred from which they can never let go. In psychology this is called “symbiosis.”
Part Four. Donald’s 6 Moral Flaws.
1. Driven by spite and cowardice, Donald sabotages his own life in order to make Pete bail him out again and again and again. This is Donald’s cowardly and passive-aggressive way of punishing Pete for what he did to him during childhood. Donald embodies the saying, “Bite my nose to spite your face.”
2. He uses religion to judge others while ignoring his own egregious flaws. In other words, Donald is a pompous ass.
3. Donald is stuck in a life of stagnation though he deludes himself with clichés that he is “breaking his pattern” (192)
4. Donald is stuck on a sense of lugubrious identity known as “victimization.” He is both overcome by spite and self-pity. As a result of seeing himself as a victim, he has reached a point of no return in which he is both undateable and unemployable.
5. As long as Donald can scapegoat Pete for all his problems, he never has to grow up and take accountability for his own actions.
6. Donald is big on generosity but only with his brother’s money, not his own.
Part Five. The 7 Qualities of Symbiosis
1. Two weak people merge to hide and reinforce their flaws.
2. Two people become mutually dependent on the other in order to stop changing, growing, maturing, and fulfilling their potential.
3. Two people use each other as a crutch and an excuse for their stagnation in life.
4. One person gets stronger and stronger or so he thinks while the other gets weaker and weaker. In truth, both get weaker and weaker because bother are more and more dependent on the other.
5. Two people stay together, not because of love, but because of weakness, hatred, and fear.
6. In a symbiosis, both people are blind or fail to admit how dependent they are on the other. On page 201 we see that Pete has a dream about Donald in which Pete is blind.
7. To use a psychological cliché, both parties of the symbiosis are called “enablers,” that is they perpetuate each other’s dysfunctions.
Part Six. Who is undergoing the “Back in the World” journey and why?
Pete is going through the journey of facing his culpability in continuing to cripple his brother. As a child he resorted to violence. Now he is killing his brother by being like the doting mother, an enabler.
Pete is a centrifugal character while Donald is incurably centripetal.
Part Seven. Pete, _________, and ___________ experience “Back in the World Moments,” which can be generally defined as waking up to the reality that you have been denying, to your detriment, for an intractable duration. This waking up consists of ____________________, ___________________________, _______________________, and ________________________________.
1. confronting your convenient ignorance or naïveté
2. confronting your own culpability in your demise
3. accepting that the world does not conform to your wants; rather you must often conform to what the world demands of you.
4. being so radically changed by your waking up that you can and will no longer tolerate the status quo
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