Essay Options for Samuel Wilson Fussell’s Muscle and Gogol's "The Overcoat"
One. Develop a thesis that analyzes the manner in which Fussell’s memoir and Akaky from "The Overcoat" illustrate the Myth of Icarus.
Two. Develop a thesis that analyzes the manner in which Fussell’s memoir and Akaky from "The Overcoat" illustrate the fable from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning “Death in Tehran”:
A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, “Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?” “I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran,” said Death.
Three. Develop a thesis that compares maladaptation in Fussell’s memoir and "The Overcoat."
Four. Research Erik Erikson’s notion of intimacy vs. isolation and develop a thesis that applies this conflict to Fussell’s memoir and "The Overcoat."
Five. Develop a cause and effect thesis that compares the causes of grotesque transformation in Fussell's memoir and "The Overcoat."
Six. A wise man once said, having a chimera will kill you, but not having a chimera will also kill you. Apply this saying to Samuel Wilson Fussell and Akaky from "The Overcoat." Both have a chimera, his obsession, the overcoat, which both transforms them for the better and for the worse. We all have our own personal chimera. Using both the memoir and the short story, write an extended definition of a chimera.
Chimera Definition Review
There's a huge disconnect between the idea of something and its actuality.
However, sometimes a chimera becomes something Larger Than Life that transforms you in both a good and a bad way. Therefore, the chimera can be full of contradictions, too complex to be demonized or venerated (admired).
One thing for sure, having a chimera will destroy us; and not having a chimera will destroy us.
The More Common Your Approach to the Chimera Example, The Worse Your Essay Will Be
Some Common chimeras
cars
clothes
weight loss, diets, training, getting your body toned a certain way
money
a love interest
UCLA
America
Some Lesson Common, Successful Chimera Examples I Have Received from Student Essays
The Past, Nostalgia (old flames on Facebook)
Therapy
Growing up too quickly
Recapturing your youth (making a comeback)
Bigorexia ("I need to weigh 300")
helplessly drawn to the world of the paranormal, ghosts, for example
you think you're "down" or cool, but then you see someone behaving like you and realize you are a helpless nincompoop.
a social circle that you long to belong to but its people have will have nothing to do with you; in fact, the people scorn and mock you even as you repeatedly attempt to gain entrance inside the group.
You want to leave an indelible print on people's memories by virtue of being larger than life, an exemplar of excellent; in other words, you want to become a chimera for others.
You value being part of a large family; however, as you witness your siblings getting married and having in-law problems, you see "the family" as a cespool of hurt feelings, acrimony, and dysfunction.
Being razzle-dazzled by someone you met on a social media site only to find out that the person is a rank avatar, a charlatan, a mountebank, an impostor.
You know someone who explicitly expresses that he is a modest, humble person, yet you always see him bragging about his superior intellectual powers, boasting about how easy he gets A grades in various math and chemistry classes and delighting in your struggle to do half as well as he does.
I love nature. I am socially responsible. I see myself as a "green" person; however, I am too damn lazy to recycle.
My chimera is my superior power to transform my body in the snap of a finger. I can, if need be, lose 12 pounds in a week because of my efficient metabolism and rigorous discipline. In fact, I am deluded and stuck in a malaise of weight gain that compromises my self-image.
Being blunt with people. He thought he was pursuing honesty but he was driven by egotism and anger.
The pride of having sons (and not daughters)
Imagining using reciprocity with kind friends but not acting.
One of my students doesn't have a chimera, but her family has made her into a chimera, the Perfect Princess.
A countercultural tattoo artist mentor who turned out to be just another self-interested, conventional businessman.
A girl who ignores the nice man and only pursues the "Bad Boy."
I once saw myself as someone who someday would be a successful novelist, but now 30 years later and still unpublished I'm reduced to tweeting about my quest for efficient digestion.
Chimera Is a Mixed Bag. It's Destructive, But Also Transforming in a Good Way
1. You haven't really lived unless you've found a Higher Purpose that motivates you to commit extreme sacrifices. Akaky’s transformation: he wakes up from his slumber, his Jahiliyyah, and becomes fully human.
Additionally, he learns how to sacrifice in the most extreme ways: he gives up tea, candles, walking on his socks, reduces his laundry to cut down on laundry expenses and to make his clothes last longer.
He doesn't sacrifice with misery. To the contrary, he enjoys this new state of sacrifice and living for something LARGER THAN HIMSELF.
One of the story's major themes:
All of us are lost in the Jahiliyyah until we find something larger than our vain, self-centered preoccupations.
Here we've arrived at the human condition: We are miserable, restless, anxious, self-involved, selfish, and bereft until we find Something Larger Than Ourselves to live for. This is the message of religion, philosophy, humanism, creativity, etc. We must be awakened from the Jahiliyyah, the protracted period of darkness and ignorance which defines Akaky's life.
But some might argue that the overcoat is simply another Jahiliyya, a chimera come to make a fool of Akaky.
The dream of the overcoat--either a delusion or a Higher Purpose, feeds Akaky's imagination, gives him hope, and makes his life more full. He feels like a married man with more a sharp focus. “He’s livelier, stronger, a man who’s made up his mind and established a goal.”
His body language changes and his eyes burn with fire. There is no hesitation or wavering in his expressions, just conviction and passion. He is born again, either spiritually or like a guy in a Lexus commercial.
The story is too ambiguous for one interpretation. He has a new charisma that inspires his boss to give him an extra Christmas bonus.
When we have a purpose in life, we are more than glad to make sacrifices. But when life is empty and is simply a monotony, then we can barely get out of bed. This is why we need chimera. A chimera gives us purpose, a reason to live, a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
But be warned: A chimera can also kill us.
2. The overcoat has magical powers; it puts Akaky on a bipolar crazy ride. It makes him happy; he doesn’t care where he walks; he suddenly finds himself at the doorstep of his department. His life is like a giddy dream, the promise of so many ads. The Chanel No. 5 Moment has come.
A brutal truth about superficial reality, materialism, and consumerism is that these things go deep into us and change who we are at our very core.
Let us repeat this: Material objects change us on the outside but they also change us on the inside. They are like placebos and we change on the inside when people treat us differently.
People treat us differently because they are reacting to our new self-confidence: Whether the confidence is born from reality or delusion, it does not matter.
3. After AA acquires the overcoat, people become obsequious sycophants and treat him like a celebrity. When people fawn over us, we turn into the image they worship and we inevitably go insane because we lose sight of ourselves. We become the image that is worshipped. Be careful of what you wish for. Discuss the Paul McCartney case and use his looks as an example of an overcoat that results in insanity.
4. Why does Akaky laugh at the picture of the woman baring her leg while a whiskered man espies her? It appears the ad is a reflection of the attention Akaky is enjoying. For the first time in AA's life, he is getting his ego tickled and massaged.
5. Because he was so needy and desperate, Akaky could not tolerate being separated from the overcoat after it was stolen from him. You cannot let an object, or even another person, be your salvation. You have to be whole first. Once Akaky has tasted human connection, he cannot return to his life of isolation, which he now sees for what it really is: an unbearable hell.
Another lesson from the chimera:
It creates needs and a dependence that did not exist before the chimera existed in our imagination. The chimera is in part about our dependence on obsession and a lot of our obsessions are centered around security, belonging, and admiration.
6. Akaky without his overcoat must face the great monstrosity of the impersonal bureaucracy and this only reinforces his smallness and insignificance.
10 distinguishing characteristics of the bureaucracy.
1. It is a chimera to see the bureacracy as a place of justice. That is not its function: The bureacracy exists to perpetuate itself, NOT to provide competent service.
2. The bureacracy thrives on the status quo and willfully ignores problems that might reveal deep-rooted dysfunctionality within the bureacracy.
3. The bureacracy thrives on petty rules and regulations while failing to provide its general mission.
4. The bureacracy reinforces the authority, those in charge, while belittling those who come to be served by it.
5. The bureacracy is a Giant Beast that consumes everyone associated with it: Its employees and the people is presumably serves.
6. The bureacracy is as slow moving as an ice berg. When it needs to change course, the change is excruciatingly slow, too slow in fact.
7. Certain types of people are drawn to the bureacracy: Small-minded, petty, mediocre, bovine people.
8. The bureacracy is based on paper work. More paper work creates more subdivisions, which in turn create more jobs. A bureacracy can never have enough paper work, forms, photocopies, attachments, annotations, revisions, addendums, etc.
9. Contrary to its high-minded rhetoric about morals and ethics, bureacracies can always be bribed as long as the bribe is implicit and there is an assurance of its essential clandestine nature.
10. Bureacracies embody the Peter Principle: They promote their employees to their maximum level of incompetence.
Conclusion about the Bureacracy As It Pertains to AA:
The Overcoat humanized, uplifted, and elevated AA for the first time in his life. In contrast, the bureacracy, head by the Very Important Person, dehumanized AA to the point of death.
Possible Essay Structure
Paragraph 1. Introduction: Profile someone who enjoyed the glory of an "overcoat" (chimera) followed by his or her demise.
Paragraph 2. Thesis with 4 or 5 mapping statements
Paragraphs 3-9: Elaborate on your mapping statements
Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a restatement of your thesis
Last page: Works Cited with no fewer than 4 sources
Class Exercise
In a paragraph write about a chimera you or someone you know once had.
Example
I used to know a Bakersfield man, a Paul McCartney look-alike, who was fated to live in the shadow of the great celebrity. He had the same nose, mouth, chin, ruddy jowls, sad-shaped eyes, and arched brows. He has the same hair, which he kept groomed the way McCartney did in the 1970s and 1980s, long in the back and feathered in the front.
However, Bakersfield McCartney was a tad shorter, stockier, and most noticeably had acne scars peppered on his cheeks. I first noticed him “trolling” himself at clubs, standing by himself in his black sport jacket, his “Beatles jacket,” and patiently waiting for an attractive woman to approach him and “break the ice” by commenting on how much he looked like Paul McCartney, as thousands of past successes had taught him. At clubs he would wear a stupid half-grin since his brain didn’t really have to be active in any sense as he simply used his resemblance as bait. The whole pick-up sequence must have been a rote, perfunctory affair.
Perhaps his biggest challenge was trying to show that his heart hadn’t become too calloused by this routine and that the woman fawning all over him was one of a few to make the brilliantly observant connection between him and the real Paul McCartney.
I later saw Bakersfield McCartney at my health club, where he had the same dumb half-grin on his face. His expression betrayed a certain expectancy, as if he knew it was only a matter of minutes before an attractive woman approached him and commented on his celebrity resemblance, a precursor to greater pleasures ahead.
Not surprisingly, I later found out that Bakersfield McCartney was a salesman—of cars and cell phones mostly—and that his resemblance worked to his advantage in the sales arena. All he had to do when people gawked over his resemblance to the great Beatles legend was act coy and “Ah-shucks,” and he could remain effective in the realm of sales—whether it be cars, cell phones, or, at the clubs, himself.
You could tell by looking over his life that he had no real challenges other than feigning good-natured surprise when the 99% of people he met commented on his striking resemblance to Paul McCartney. Otherwise, he was content to live in the shadows of the Liverpool crooner. Last I heard, he had never married, had never carried a long relationship, had never really put much effort in anything he did at all. He was a man content to live off a one-note gimmick and he had no shame for being so easily satisfied. Lacking any rigorous struggles to become a real person, he had become somewhat of a cipher, a hollow man with nothing to say about anything. His mind was simply full of the expectations of receiving “goodies”—accolades, sexual attention, strangers’ obsequiousness as they become elated in the presence of a mock celebrity.
His life lost its cheap glory in middle-age when his facial features distorted—bigger ears and nose, a reconfiguration of jowls and chin—so as to significantly obscure his face so that he no longer looked like the Beatles legend. With no more celebrity connection, his posse of friends and lovers abandoned him and his sales dwindled. Sullen and bitter, he moved back with his mother, a widow, where he now resides. I imagine him now introverted and chubby from a sedentary lifestyle, his bedroom cluttered with Beatles souvenirs, as he languishes in his bedroom where he daydreams of his past glory.
Similary, Akaky Akakievich from Gogol's masterpiece "The Overcoat" is a man fated to ruin after bathing in the short-lived glory of his own facade, an almost supernatural overcoat. What we see in the case of the lugubrious lookalike and equally pathetic Akaky is that to be enthralled by a chimera is to go through a journey of madness, which includes ___________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.
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