The narrator gives us a very clear insight into his feeling of all that he is covering up and holding inside. He has secrets that are surrounding him and feels like he can never truly be himself (hence the masking). But throughout the section we read for Tuesday, I found a repetition in his narration of statements such as, “life had enslaved him” (87) “took me captive” (9) and “lusts hidden under his wing” (72). There is a definite feeling of being lost in his own life, and he does not feel like he really knows what direction to go in. It is one thing to feel like we are living a hidden life with the frustration of no one knowing our true self, but I feel like there is another level that our author reveals through the narrator. The feeling of life enslaving him puts the blame somewhere else. I don’t really know where, but in all of his confusion he seems to have a pretty clear view of the situation he has been placed into. He takes responsibility to some extent, but in many ways he seems to be blaming the world around him. Maybe it’s just me, but it really sounds like he views himself as a victim in all of this.
Perhaps the "enslavement" theme comes from the feeling of having these desires against his will? He wishes to be a "normal" boy and wills himself to be so, but he is unable to do so because his attraction to boys and men cannot be controlled by his will.
ReplyDeleteKochan is, I believe, a victim in his own eyes. Aside from Omi (in whom he sees loneliness) Kochan disregards anyone's suffering. Even those ravaged by war are an insignificant occurrence outside of his own pain. As a reader I was incensed that the bombing of Hiroshima occupied only one sentence within the novel, “When I was finally able to get out of bed I heard the news of the bombing of Hiroshima” (217). At this point it seems obvious that Kochan is a narcissist that believes his own suffering to be greater than any others. Yukio Mishima chose to write a character that lived in the time of World War Two, he also decided that Kochan's life should not revolve around the war. That is fine by me, this is a coming of age book and realistically a child that has grown up in war time would view war as just another daily event. Yet to be alive and live near the killing of an estimated 130,000 people, and to sacrifice only a second of awareness on the death of thousands seems to me a clear indication that Mishima wanted the reader to view Kochan as a narcissist that is only involved in his own pain and suffering, making his behavior all the more self-serving in the reader's eyes.
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