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
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
Part Eight. Journal Entry
Write about a sibling rivalry that contains the symbiosis evident in Donald and Pete
Comments