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Tale Of The Garden Of Eden Analysis

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A careful examination of human history yields a clearly defined, repetitious pattern: one of predators and prey, of the powerful and powerless; one of wicked nature and peaceful civilization, of striking randomness and monotonous routine. A near-ideal abstraction of these naturally-occurring, contradicting events is that of the ever-present appearance of order and chaos in the universe. The seemingly omnipresent struggle between order and chaos is also readily observed in one of the most representative linguistic accounts of historical ideas on human morality: Genesis. Genesis’ story of the Garden of Eden, depicting a utopian habitat for the divinely moral individual, protects Adam and Eve from the deadly elements and the harsh realities of …show more content…
Through the story, O’Brien often shows the stark contrasts between the horrific lives of the American soldiers to the peaceful, almost automatic lives of regular civilians. O’Brien firstly uses Norman Bowker, a dysfunctional, destroyed soul, to contrast against the ordinary lives of his former friends. Bowker struggles to even instigate a dialogue with his childhood crush, Sally, whom he still cares deeply for: “For a moment he’d almost pulled over, just to talk, but instead he’d pushed down hard on the gas pedal . . . there was really nothing he could say to her” (133). Norman Bowker serves as a clear example of the importance of order in life, as he struggles to reconnect with his former self after returning from the hellscape of Vietnam. Depressingly and paradoxically, his misguided soul attempts to stray as far away from his past as physical realities permit, and he slams on the accelerator. Through this scene, O’Brien portrays how strikingly close Bowker is to returning to his upbringing, yet how impossibly separated the two are. Bowker cannot even bring himself to articulate a single word to Sally, as the mind-corrupting chaos of his haunting past has virtually locked him away into a completely isolated plain of existence. Sally is unreachable to Bowker; she is incompatibly and eternally tuned into a different wavelength, wrought by her …show more content…
Without chaos, there would consequently be no purpose to order, as order could not even be defined. Chaos, as O’Brien aptly proves, is the force through which individuals realize new truths about the world, and experience true meaning in life. Meaning in life, as O’Brien shows through the war, is actually achieved by divergence from the constant, absolute order of the routine. O’Brien utilizes vivid images of war to strongly highlight such ideas: “War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love.” (51). O’Brien vividly shows the thrillingly chaotic, (yet also orderly), experiences gleaned from battle. To culturally accept war as a natural hell of the world, O’Brien claims, is, almost condescendingly, to ignore such accompanying features as the adventure, discovery and love which also reveal themselves through war. In other words, war is not merely layered, unfettered waves of chaos. Rather, war, the perplexing collage of a seemingly unending list of varying life experiences, truly is the quintessential embodiment of a struggle between order and chaos. Even further, brutal conflict is arguably the most poignant example of this struggle, as war is not simply another microcosm of a light skirmish between order and chaos-(an example being the order

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