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.
Qualities of a Chimera
Chasing an unrealistic dream:
genetic perfection, a "super race" of people
flying to another galaxy
shrinking to the size of ant
living 500 years, 1,000 years
forever; people who freeze their bodies so they can be "de-freezed" sometime later; conquering all diseases
taking growth hormones to enjoy "eternal youth"
finding personal transformation through consumerism
time travel
finding a way to become invisible
cure or panacea that will wipe away all disease as we know it
perfect love
the perfect relationship
Mrs. Right
Mr. Right
Having a Sense of Proportion . . . Or Not
One of the salient features of a chimera is that it is something that we have blown out of proportion.
As we surrender to our obsession, we also surrender to our irrational impulses. We go "off the grid," so to speak, we have a "free fall," and there is no bottom.
A woman goes to Walmart on Black Friday and uses pepper spray on the other shoppers.
Cubs fans almost killed a guy who caught a foul ball.
A man has a relationship with his car, waxing and kissing it.
A man, fearing the end of the world, spends his life in an underground bunker.
A woman bathes in bleach to "conquer germs."
A man asked me to deliver flowers to his girlfriend's apartment to see if another man was there.
A man "commits the sin of fornication" and is so overcome by shame he hides in a nearby forest and lives a life of contrite solitude for 5 years before he re-enters society.
A man fills his spare room with toilet paper because he's afraid he will find himself "empty handed in a tough situation."
Akaky obsesses over a coat as if he were searching for the Holy Grail, starving himself and engaging in other huge sacrifices to buy a garment.
All these instances show people blowing things out of proportion.
The psychological causes behind this phenomenon of blowing things out of proportion are several which include the following:
One. Mob mentality. We succumb to the mob and unleash our irrational beast, wanting to kill a fan for catching a baseball that may have been the final out of an inning.
Two. Too much alone time. When we're alone, we tend to think too much. More thinking isn't necessarily better thinking. It can simply be more bad thinking.
And when we're alone, our thoughts aren't challenged by others so that often our solitary thoughts become distorted, exaggerated, and paranoid.
Three. Loneliness compels us to obsess over something, a chimera, to compensate for our sense of disconnection. The obsession is an attempt to connect with something and overcome the fear and dread of loneliness.
Four. Faulty memory, turning the past into something more than it was, causes us to inflate the importance of something. We call this exaggerated, romanticized memory nostalgia. Nostalgia is often a chimera.
Five. Impoverishment Through Substitution. When we lack basic human needs--belonging, distinction, flourishing, love, meaningful work--we substitute with inferior things, that is chimeras, meant to fill the void.
Six. Not living in the present causes us to live in a distorted future and/or past. These distortions can become chimeras.
Seven. We often chase self-destructive chimeras because we crave extreme drama to fill the emptiness in our lives. As such, cravings for extreme drama compel us to blow things out of proportion.
Eight. When we're desperate for approval and validation of others, we tend to look for some mighty token of our greatness and we misplace this need in some chimera or other.
Nine. Self-pity by its very nature is exaggerated and blown out of proportion because it is a narcissistic impulse and thus results in overblown self-regard.
Ten. Projection. The unconscious projection of our inner selves on outward things makes us see things as being greater than they really are.
The Ghost Story in "The Overcoat" Gets Blown Out of Proportion
One. The ghost story becomes a myth, a narrative that grows over time and expresses meaning, fears, wishes, collective values of the people, similar to the way biblical narratives are developed and explained by some authors you read.
As a story grows and grows within a community, it evolves and takes on a life of its own. This life explains people’s deepest longings and their sense of the way life is. As such, these stories become myths and in an ironic way they become a deeper part of our reality that stories that are literally true. Mark Twain said that rumors and lies spread faster than truth.
For example, there is a story about me beating up Jamie Barnes in high school when in fact I did not, but the fictional story became more appealing, more juicy, than the truth, and it continues to evolve and become festooned with embellishments to this day.
Jamie hit my hand with his hairbrush in the high school corridor. I told him to "get back."
One story I rip my shirt off.
Another story I do a flying kick.
Another story I push him through a wall and he crashes into a chemistry class, causing the mixture and eventual explosion of dangerous chemicals.
Every year, my brother, who plays basketball at the community center, hears new mutations of the story, which is believed as "gospel truth."
Two. A ghost is a metaphor for a haunted, guilty conscience, the hunger for revenge, and the hunger for justice.
Three. People with nice coats become the victims of thievery and mugging and they come up with the ghost explanation but the deeper truth is that nice things act like a drug on society, create a certain mania and the owners of coveted things become targets. I’m reminded of the ring and Mordor.
Four. We see that the VIP in the aftermath of AA’s death is overcome with remorse. He is a doubt-ridden sensitive man who played his power cards all wrong and now he must pay the price. I’m reminded of Randy Moss who yelled at a catering service before the Vikings released him. In his state of remorse, he sees a paramour and commits adultery. Having a paramour, an illicit lover is “in style,” according to the VIP; hence he is a man committed to image over substance; being an adulterer is part of his overcoat, his mask.
Five. We see that VIP’s rank was a mask, like an overcoat, that prevented him from revealing his true self. The chimera is a facade that prevents us from seeing the abyss, the existential vacuum that torments us.
Six. The narrator makes a mockery of the VIP’s braggadocio in the face of his seeing the ghost of AA who looks like a homunculus.
The VIP is so haunted that he returns home chastened and without his overcoat, a metaphor for being stripped of his facades, stripped to his bare existence, as Viktor Frankl would say, and he becomes averse to using games of power over people. He is more thoughtful and less rash.
Student Example of A-Level Chimera Introduction, Transition, and Thesis
I married Janet even though I didn't love her. I loved Janet's sister Abbey. I figured marrying Janet was the next best thing.
I had been in love with Abbey since the fifth grade and knew, even then, that winning her affections was a complete impossibility. When I tried to hold her books during walks to school, she screamed for the police. When I sat next to her in the cafeteria, she cried until one of the cafeteria monitors issued me a detention slip. When I asked her to the high school Senior Ball, her boyfriend jumped out of nowhere and slugged me on the side of the head. Minutes later, I woke up in a daze and, perhaps acting under the influence of a damaged brain, I was convinced that the only thing I could do was to marry Janet, Abbey’s plain-looking sister. To call her “plain-looking” is a bit generous and in fact sometimes in the depths of my heart I referred to her as “The Ugly Sister,” even after we had started dating and had become, officially, boyfriend and girlfriend.
My ulterior motives in becoming Janet’s “steady” were clear: Janet had a room next the Beautiful Sister, Abbey, and this gave me close access to my true love, a condition that both gave me great excitement and seething dyspepsia.
In order to maintain my cover, I exercised the utmost decency and kindness to Janet who, grateful for my attentions, continued to see me through high school and college until marriage became inevitable. Of course, I had misgivings after the marriage and was so overcome by “the tragedy of it all” that I spent our Hawaiian honeymoon in a deep depression, cooped up in the hotel bathroom reading self-help books.
Over time, the depression became less extreme as I convinced myself that I was in fact in love with Janet and even though I knew that to be a lie, I also knew that by telling a lie over and over, the truth could get buried underground and, while not disappearing completely, it could be subjugated into a slight unpleasant background noise, like elevator Muzak.
After Janet and I got married and settled in our new home, Abbey was both grateful that someone married her sister (for Janet was known amongst her family as “the less pretty one”) and also relieved that I was, now presumably in love with Janet, no threat to her so that Abbey began to open up to me as a “friend.” Naturally, Abbey’s familiar, intimate manner with me inflamed my passions so that I would often come home from family events and cry miserably. When my wife questioned my tears, I explained they were tears of gratitude, for I never believed I would find, in my wife, a love so perfect.
I feared that my life would go on in this manner indefinitely, pitying myself and lying to my wife. However, as years passed, I began to realize that Abbey, divorced twice and always in and out of volatile relationships, had a rather fussy and what some might say “hellish” personality and I saw that I was fortunate to have been spared her imperious ways.
Lacking any real passion for my own wife, I was pleased to find that our arrangement was absent of strife and acrimony but that unfortunately I had more energy to focus on the flaming desires I felt for her sister. At the same time, I was now wise enough, or so I believed, to know that those desires would never be fulfilled. I was therefore resigned to enduring this constant tension of living in relative nuptial harmony, absent the passion, for the one sister, while living in torment, because of the unquenched desire, for the other. But on balance I saw that this arrangement was the best of all possibilities and I accepted my fate with grace and equanimity.
In contrast, Abbey, divorced yet again and observing the stable domestic life Janet and I had created, divulged to me one day that I was a “great catch” after all and she despised herself for having been so blind as to repel my solicitations so that her adult years were now full of undying anguish as she longed for me while she saw her sister live in relative happiness and contentment.
I wish I could say here that I rejected Abbey’s affections and her appeals to “get to know me better,” but sadly I found that when confronted with my lifelong burning chimera that I could not repel her and that, consequently, a dalliance ensued. I must also report that Abbey’s and my behavior became less and less prudent and that, inevitably, Janet discovered us in an compromising position and that this discovery resulted in our divorce. To reconcile with her sister, Abbey virulently rejected me, and accused me of being the “instigator” when in fact this was not so. Therefore, in the aftermath of my divorce, I was not in a position to marry the sister I had wanted all along but in fact was doomed to be despised by her because by her despising me Abbey could sublimate her guilt for having betrayed her sister and she could appease Janet who saw Abbey’s hatred of me as proof of her sister’s loyalty.
I suppose the divorce afforded me some relief, largely from the fact that my marriage had been a complete sham and that I was an impostor, unworthy of making the one sister long for me and unworthy of making the other happy. And yet there was a certain point in that fraudulent marriage in which I had done both, and in spite of my shame for being the fraud that I was, I also gloated with a surge of pride for having “pulled it off.”
Of course, now the gloating was over. Now my life was a long, tedious moral hangover, an intractable perdition for which I saw no escape even as my therapist implored me to “let go” of my guilt and to “let go” of a past for which I could not change.
Student "A" Paper Analysis of Akaky's Reaction to the Loss of His Overcoat
Michelle Borden
Jeff McMahon
English 1A
May 23, 2012
Cat Panic and Out
Many people have died or become ill as the result of a broken heart, a job loss, or a nasty divorce. I just got over a bad inner ear infection after we moved to a new house. Last time my in-laws visited, I broke out into a rash all over my chest. Scientifically, when we experience stress, our bodies go into cat-in-water mode. When in-laws visit, our adrenal glands begin to produce epinephrine (adrenalin), norepinephrine and cortisol to give us the extra energy we need to fight off a constant stream of passive-aggressive remarks like a cat when you try to put it in water. Afterwards, our bodies want to recover and to sit back, lick our fur, and stare hatefully at our oppressors. If there is no time to recover, if the stress continues, the brain simply stays in cat-in-water mode and leaves the rest of the body with no real defense against disease. This is the crux of how "stress kills" from a scientific standpoint. I think it goes deeper than that. What if our bodies are just doing us a favor? Who truly wants to exist in a stressful, meaningless world?
We might say we would rather be alive and stressed than dead and relaxed (fully), but perhaps we don't know any better. When there is "no way out," our bodies might find their own way, sans suicide, to escape extreme duress. Akakiy Akakiavitch lived an undemanding, low-stress existence before he was presented with the problem of the overcoat. A tormented person would not allow food scraps to land upon them without flinching and remarking on the terrible life they have to endure. A stressed-out person would act like a cat in water. Every crappy groundhoggishday was the same for Akakiy, and that was how he planned on continuing with his life. I find nothing really wrong with that. Outside of the time that he was asked to perform a task outside of copy, he lived in a tao-like state... action through non-action. His stress levels only began to elevate the closer he came to getting the overcoat. The overcoat awakened his mind in a way that allowed life, the one that you feel, to come in.
When a simple man's life is turned upside down, it is tremendously more stressful for him to overcome as opposed to a complex individual's reaction to change. The simple man sees change as unneccessary and insurmountable. If he does gain the courage to actually make changes, he has now swam out into hostile waters and is subjected to new complications that change can evoke. Akikay Akakiavitch was ill prepared for anything other than an uncomplicated life. If the tailor had just patched up his worn-out coat, he would have continued to play in complacency with the cards he had been dealt. But the tailor and the weather forced change upon his life and he dealt with it by cutting out things that most of us would consider necessity. When we cut something out in our lives, we feel it, but Akikay didn't feel it like we do. He was still living life free from cat panic. The overcoat came, showering him with unfamiliar attention and circumstances that he had to cope with on another level. Even though Akikay seemed to like the attention, he had never received it before in his life and wasn't really sure it was the kind of life he wanted to live. The evening's party didn't bring him joy; just a few smiles here and there. He didn't relish the excessive food after starving himself for months to afford the overcoat. He didn't let loose because Akakiy Akakiavitch isn't the type to do such a thing. It's not in his nature. Akakiy was programmed to feel insignificant. On his way home, he realizes how far from "home" he truly feels right before his overcoat is taken from him. Had Akakiy's old coat been stolen, he would not have reacted in such a way. But this was the awakened Akakiy, the one who felt like might just owe him something other than ordinary. He misses work for the first time and goes to talk to the prominent personage about his overcoat being stolen. The old Akakiy would never do something so rash. But the new Akakiy was filled with cat panic and he did something out of character to fix the problem. When the prominent personage put Akakiy in his place and made him feel like the insignificant person that he actually was, it was too much for Akakiy to bear. The changes that had befallen him were too great for the simple man whose former life required so little to sustain. So his body said, "screw this life," and abandoned him for death, a place where he could have as many overcoats as he pleased.
