Sunday, February 21, 2010

Daisy

Ignorance may be bliss but ignorance is also a blinder. As the character Daisy navigates her way through The Great Gatsby she uniquely exposes the issue of being too flimsy. Further more it brings up a controversial question; What is a proper way to live a life? Should a person be alright with living under a blanket of oblivion or should they strive to be well-rounded? Honestly, I think it can go either way.

This may be a frustrating ambivalent statement but I do not think some people can fully handle the harsh truths of the world. People who can not deal with the responsiblility of knowledge and insight often have very dim futures when they try to comprehend it. This rule kind of applies also to the things you choose not to think about such as how you got to this planet via mother, and that parents still kiss. These things are the innocent bliss of human nature. The denial of things the conscience tells us is disgusting or too intense to think about.

The fact that Daisy never wants her daughter to have to face reality is actually a quality most parents wish for. No person would willingly, in their right mind, introduce a soul to the world if they thought it would suffer pain, and heart ache. For Daisy to stand up and say what the silent majority is all thinking is honorable of her and resulted in my respect for her character.

On the literary side of things, Daisies insistence on being ignorant is a brilliant character choice. She is able to put her husband’s affair aside with her acute spaciness skills. Although she is most likely a brilliant girl, she covers this fact with a low intelligence level to push all confrontation and hurt out of her life.

Living separate from emotion ensures you will never experience hurt, pain, and envy. Parallel to this, you will never taste the feelings of love, joy, or inspiration. That is why Daisy, as a character, forces one to look into the mirror and see which one they would personally like to have; a world full of emotion good or bad, or a world experiencing no true forms of emotion just samples of each. I personally would rather experience grief if in return I would be able to feel true happiness. This tradeoff is worth it to me personally.

Ignorance may be bliss however it blinds you from what true bliss really is. Therefore can ignorance truly be bliss or is it just bland? But if one never lived in anything besides ignorance will they even be able to tell the difference? Probably not, unless one day they break the pattern and realize there is more to life than just getting by.

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