Essay #5: Final Capstone Essay for 200 Points: Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Gogol’s “The Overcoat”:
Option One. Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the quest for identity in Wolff’s memoir and Gogol’s "The Overcoat." Consider maladaptation and the chimera as traps resulting from the search for identity.
Option Two. A wise man once said, having a chimera will kill you, but not having a chimera will also kill you. Develop an argumentative thesis that shows how this saying applies to Wolff’s memoir and Gogol’s "The Overcoat."
Option Three: Compare This Boy's Life's themes of masculinity, identity, and the danger of wasting one's life with the 1993 film A Bronx Tale.
Option Four. Compare and contrast the "crazy, abusive love" between Tobias' mother and Dwight in This Boy's Life with the couple in the 2007 documentary Crazy Love.
Option Five. Develop an argumentative thesis that compares the theme of self-destructive chimera, American Dream facade, and deformed masculinity as they are evident in Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life and the 1999 film American Beauty. The idealized self can be a self-destructive chimera as we see in the following essay, which contains many parallels to Tobias Wolf as he renders himself in his memoir:
"I was hooked on meth for 11 years"
One. Tobias and the author Ed Kressy have a "me" problem. They hate who they are and feel so weighed down by self-loathing that they fantasize about being a super version of themselves. This super self is a chimera, a mirage, a sort of lie.
Two. Ed uses drugs to mask his self-loathing. Tobias disappears into a world of lies and self-aggrandizing fantasies.
Three. Both see the idealized life as never being safe enough, so they are both reckless with their lives on one hand while clinging to a more idealized version of life on the other.
Four. When you live a life of delusion and self-destruction that is obviously pathological to the casual outsider observer, you find that because you are used to such a crazy life, that this crazy life becomes your normal.
Five.
One. What is a chimera?
A chimera is part mirage, part all-consuming dream, and part obsession that attempts to fill a hole in one’s soul. The chimera is by its very nature an illusion so that at the end of the chimera journey is not a rainbow but a thunder shower of tears.
However, if one learns from one’s disastrous chimera journey, one will have hard-fought wisdom that will enrich one’s life.
One hasn’t really lived unless one has been inside the belly of a chimera and spit out like half-masticated lunchmeat.
The greatest books, therefore, are books about survivors of chimeras.
Typically, we try to fill the holes in our tattered souls with chimeras. We believe, erroneously, that we will find happiness and fulfillment by
UCLA degree
Trophy spouse
Six pack of abs
Viral YouTube video
Millions of social media followers
Some reinvented self that embodies genius, rugged self-reliance, and charismatic sex appeal
Physical beauty that causes the human race to fall to the ground and weep with desire and envy
Intellectual achievement that causes others to tremble with intimidation by our super-sized brain
Proving our detractors that they were wrong: We stay in a relationship, not out of love or even a desire to stay in the relationship, but to prove our skeptics that we truly are mature enough to be in a relationship.
Pair of “skinny” trousers in our closet that have been hanging there for 5 years as we wait to be “our old skinny self.”
Chanel No. 5 Moment: A Chanel No. 5 Moment is the delusion that you are the center of attention, that everyone is in awe of you, and that everyone longs to be like you. I know people whose entire lives evolve around creating Chanel No. 5 Moments
The Price We Pay for Our Chimeras
We sell our soul and our left arm to achieve the above chimeras and we get chewed up by our own foolishness and self-destruction.
This Boy’s Life is written from the point of view of an adult who looks at the foolish chimeras of his youth and the implicit message is that Tobias Wolff, the man and the writer, is a better, more moral, more wise person as a result of his battle with the chimera.
In contrast, Akaky from Gogol’s “The Overcoat” is consumed by his chimera with no opportunity for resurrection or redemption. Akaky’s life is predetermined by the limitations of his character to be fouled up by his chimera journey whereas Tobias Wolff has the presence of mind (metacognition) to be resilient in the face of his chimera journey and emerge from the journey wiser and smarter.
Akaky is limited in his self-awareness and metacognition. In contrast, Tobias Wolff has the powers of self-awareness, which give him the freedom to transform his personality for the better.
Two. Wolff begins the memoir with the following Oscar Wilde quote:
“The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second is, no one has yet discovered.” What does this quote mean?
We are so obsessed with putting up an image of ourselves to others and ourselves that we have forgotten to have any content. We are full of fluff but empty on substance. We are a mirage to others and ourselves. This is an ongoing theme in the memoir.
This “pose” was captured no better than by French philosopher Blaise Pascal in the Penees:
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 endeavour to shine. We labour 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.
Three. What’s the difference between being hard on ourselves and beating the crap out of ourselves? (Tobias internalizes the latter from the abuse of his stepfather)
Being hard on ourselves means never being satisfied with mediocrity and constantly setting higher and higher standards. As a result, we’re constantly improving ourselves and/or our performance at a certain task or discipline.
To be hard on ourselves means to have a high self-regard, high self-esteem, high self-confidence, and high expectations.
In contrast, beating the crap out of ourselves means demoralizing ourselves into a state of paralyzed depression so that we never get out of our hole. We languish in self-pity and remain stagnant as life passes us by.
To beat the crap out of ourselves evidences low self-regard, low self-esteem, low self-confidence, and low expectations.
Low expectations translate into giving up on responsibilities and giving up on life, which means the person who beats the crap out of himself plays the victim and goes around sulking and having a self-pity party while waiting for the world to love him. He is a self-entitled self-destructive brat.
I have Marc Maron, creator of the WTF podcast, to thank for this distinction.
Four. What bad omens do Tobias and his mother face in the memoir’s opening?
A truck with no brakes loses control and falls off a cliff, a sort of metaphor of living life without brakes (powers of reason to temper one’s dreams).
When we pursue a chimera full steam ahead, we have no braking mechanisms to abate our self-destruction, and we go into a free fall.
In many ways the memoir is about a boy and his mother falling down a rabbit hole and the mechanisms that eventually kick in that will save both mother and child.
As far as chimeras go, Tobias and his mother live off dreams of riches, of finding a home, of finding stability, of finding “transformation” (5).
But they live a life of poor nomads, and they are vulnerable to evil. Sadly, evil will be arriving in the form of a sociopath stepfather named Dwight.
One of the memoir’s themes is that dreams are a sort of drug or narcotic. As such, dreams can grow unabated by the powers of reason and skepticism and people can be crushed by their false dreams without even knowing it.
Perhaps that is the tragedy of self-destruction: It happens while we are unaware of it.
However, I have “seen myself” behave in compulsive, self-destructive ways and felt powerless to intervene. And I have spoken to others who have been in the same boat.
Self-destruction can occur unawares or as the victim sees his atrocious behavior with full awareness. There is no universal formula for self-destruction except for one thing: The victim is powerless and in desperate need of an exit sign.
Tobias’ mother is running away from a failed marriage and an abusive boyfriend and she thinks mining uranium and getting rich will free her from her self-destructive ways, but she is mistaken.
Too often we embrace some chimera or other rather than confront the real cause of our unhappiness—some sort of self-destructiveness inside us that makes us our own worst enemy.
Five. How does Utah become a chimera?
Utah was supposed to promise riches and transformation, but it was too late. Overcrowded with no vacancies, its inhabitants were failed dreamers—drunks, murderous criminals, and prostitutes litter the streets.
It’s like a zombie set of The Walking Dead.
We can infer that TV programs about zombies are popular because zombies resonate with us metaphorically. Probably the majority of the human race is victimized by its own self-destructive chimera-seeking and as a result the majority of the human race slogs through life in the zombie state.
Zombies by their very nature are both self-destructing and doing so under a cloak of darkness and ignorance.
Six. What dreams of transformation intoxicate Tobias?
Tobias, known as Toby, wants to change his name to a more masculine Jack and be the prototype of the Wild West Rugged Man, the quintessence of “strength and competence” and self-sufficiency that defines the pioneer and the cowboy.
He probably wants to be big and strong so he can protect his mother from the abusive men who keep finding her or vice versa.
But overall Tobias believes in a chimera: “If I become Ultimate Rugged Masculinity, I my sense of inadequacy will dissipate and I will be able to conquer all my enemies and help my mother and me make it to the Land of Milk and Honey.”
This chimera world, we shall see, is internal. It exists inside his head. It is not connected to the real world.
Tobias has grown up feeding off the chimera because his parents taught him that chimeras are normal. For example, Tobias’ father is a con man selling dreams to get rich; his mother seems to be a victim of various cons.
Tobias lives in a swamp of illusion and shady snake oil salesmen. And from his point of view, this is all normal because normal is what you’re used to.
Dreams of transformation are based on him not knowing himself. As we read: “Because I did not know who I was, any image of myself, no matter how grotesque, had power over me. This much I understand now” (27).
He is so full of self-loathing and low self-esteem that any identity OTHER than who he really is must be better is the mentality that is instilled in him.
When we don’t know who we are, we have no rock, no stable foundation. As a result, we easily become unhinged.
Seven. What kind of anxiety plagues Tobias and how does this anxiety relate to his obsession with self-transformation?
We read that he is “subject to fits of feeling myself unworthy, somehow deeply at fault.”
When we feel unworthy we have what feels like a hole in the soul and we desperately try to fill the hole, often in misguided ways.
When we feel unworthy we are prone to beating the crap out of ourselves than on being hard on ourselves. As a result, we are prone to the self-destructive disease of self-pity and the paralysis and ennui that such self-pity ensues.
Sad, lonely, and full of inadequacy, Tobias (Jack, as he calls himself) imagines himself being adopted evidencing his desire for belonging and for feeling worthy. He befriends other families’ dogs.
He writes grandiose and fictitious letters to his pen pal Alice in Phoenix in which he represents himself as a wealthy horse owner.
As with most people who feel fragmented and soul-tattered, he relies on materialism or things to fill his soul. He believes a .22 rifle will make him feel “complete” the way many men will be “completed” by a Mercedes and a Rolex.
He wants to be worshipped (have people in “awe” of him) as if that would fill his soul’s hole.
Tobias’ dreams of grandiosity must also rise from his desire to protect his mother from her abusive boyfriends and the guilt from feeling so helpless to protect her.
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.
Some 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 cesspool 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 on your thoughts, just satisfying yourself with the thoughts themselves.
One of my students doesn't have a chimera, but her family has made her into a chimera, the Perfect Princess and they sheltered her to her detriment.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Weaponized Lies
How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era
Daniel J. Levitin
Lesson #1: Demise of Critical Thinking in the Post-Truth Era
Demise of Critical Thinking
Daniel J. Levitin in his book Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth era makes the claim that “the language we use has begun to obscure the relationship between facts and fantasy.”
His second claim is that this failure of language to divide fact from fantasy can be attributed to a lack of an appropriate education for most of America’s citizens.
Such a condition, Levitin, observes is part of the post-truth age, a term granted Word of the Year for 2016 in the Oxford Dictionary.
Feel-Good Relativism and Euphemisms Contribute to the Decomposition of Truth
Relying on the lame clichés that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, all opinions are equally valid, and we shouldn’t criticize falsehoods when we see them because we all “just need to get along,” we rely on euphemisms.
When a person says something as dumb and crazy as the claim that Hillary Clinton is running a child slave industry out of a Comet Ping Pong Pizza, we should call this a bat**** crazy lie, but instead we call it “fake news.” Or some other euphemism is “fringe theory.”
Levitin writes: “Other euphemisms for lies are counterknowledge, half-truths, extreme views, alt truth, conspiracy theories, and the more recent appellation, ‘fake news.’”
In fact, not all opinions are equal. There are informed opinions, those derived from credible evidence, and uniformed or misinformed opinions. Only the first kind is valid, but we’re told to “respect everyone’s opinions,” which is a euphemism for putting lies on equal footing with truth.
Fake news spreads like wildfire on social media and enjoys equal attention from journalists who feel they have to address a force that is having a huge impact on public opinion. This creates the illusion, or delusion, that the fake news is valid.
Death of Reading
Levitin observes that Americans don’t read anymore. He writes, “The number of books students read on average declines steadily every single year after second grade.” Moreover, 1 in 5 Americans “were not able to locate information in text or ‘make low-level inferences using printed materials.’”
Edgar Welch, the Comet Ping Pong shooter, was manipulated into believing the lie about Hillary Clinton’s slave trade in a pizzeria. He evidenced zero critical thinking skills, and he is not some fringe group. Huge voting blocs, with crazy ideas like Edgar Welch’s, can be persuaded by demagogues, manipulators and false prophets.
Reading Replaced by Facebook
Facebook is now the number source of news. Seeing that lies were spreading on their site, Facebook is not “making it easier for its 1.8 billion members to report fake news.”
It will be difficult since Russian hackers and other bots know how to disseminate fake news across social media sites, and social media users don’t have the critical thinking skills to detect these lies.
We can believe anything, no matter how stupid, Levitin observes, because of “the evolutionary tendency toward gullibility,” which can only be cured through critical thinking skills.
Stanford Study Shows Death of Critical Thinking Skills
A Stanford University study tested more than 7,800 students from intermediate school through college for eighteen months. The researchers cite a “stunning and dismaying consistency. Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak. They were horrible at distinguishing high-quality news from lies.” They lack critical thinking skills.
Critical Thinking
Levitin’s definition of critical thinking: “Critical thinking trains us to take a step back, to evaluate facts and form evidence-based conclusions.” This skill is almost extinct.
Later in the book he writes: “Critical thinking doesn’t mean we disparage everything; it means that we try to distinguish between claims with evidence and those without.”
Critical thinking is also not becoming stubborn with one’s unexamined beliefs and opinions. He quotes Mark Twain who said: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Levitin started writing his book in 2001. By 2014-2016, he says the spreading of lies on non-critical thinkers has gotten far worse.
3 Kinds of Strategic Defense
The problem is we are overwhelmed with information. As Levitin notes, “We’ve created more human-made information in the past five years than in all of human history before them.”
To combat all this date, we need 3 skills:
One. How to identify numerical misinformation, mishandled statistics and graphs, which can give skewed, grossly distorted perspective and cause us to draw faulty conclusions.
Two. How to identify faulty arguments based on logical fallacies.
Three. How to identify if something is true or false based on scientific empirical evidence.
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