Comparing The Human Spirit Vs. The Human Ego

The Human Spirit VS The Human Ego

The power of the written word has been utilized across the span of human history and the conflict between Bill the infamous novelist and Jean-Claude or the prisoner who is a writer of almost no renown is my focus here. In Bill we see a writer trapped by his success, a man who would have gladly traded his fame for ambiguity and the freedom it entails except that this would compromise his name and his legacy. The written word has facilitated all of Bill’s dreams while crushing him beneath the weight of their meaning to others. Jean-Claude is a prisoner of a Maoist extremist group in Beirut led by a man who believes they are the beginning of a “world revolution.” (233) Jean-Claude is introduced already imprisoned

but almost manically positive. The idea of his own demise does not initially enter his mind, he will by force of will he would “learn Arabic and impress his captors” (108). By his “recall of detail and his analysis of facets and aspects” he will impress the authorities who will eventually question him in order to track down the people responsible for his capture. (108) As his time in captivity goes on we see him break down to the external agitator and to the hopelessness that is his imprisonment. Jean-Claude is powerless to affect the world around him which he feels most in his inability to “sustain a thought,place it in the world” and trapped by forces entirely outside his control (110). Bill is trapped inside a prison of his own ego and Jean-Claude mirrors this in his actual imprisonment, one incapable of escape and one unwilling to break free.

Bill struggles throughout the novel with an inner conflict centered around his own persona and a novel he has written that he cannot escape which has come to represent everything Bill finds himself struggling with internally. Bill struggles with his own fame, he lives in stark fear that if he goes out in public that he will be recognized and forced to interact with people who have taken his writings and made him into some kind of deity evidenced in Scott’s mission to and eventual success in tracking Bill down and becoming his assistant. Bill had formulated a plan to violently remove himself from interacting with Scott in their initial meeting until Scott sold himself to Bill. This is Bill’s everyday terror, that he will interact with people and they will see him simply as a man and he won’t have the answers to the profound questions that his readers expect he will know. Bill cannot finish his novel as he is convinced it cannot compare with his other novels and it will destroy his reputation. The written word has left him no escape that does not involve destroying his own perception of himself.

In his photo shoot with Brita, she estimates Bill’s last photographic appearance “ Am I right that it’s thirty years since your picture has appeared anywhere?” (36) Bill explains that he wouldn’t know right off hand but that this is the reason for their current interaction, Bill states that “When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s reluctance to appear.” (36) Scott and Bill hope that by doing the photo-shoot it might take some pressure off Bill and allow him to refocus on his work. Bill’s work being the thing that has become his inner demon his “second self” the “self-important fool that keeps the writer going.” (37)

The photoshoot with Brita is their attempt to open the proverbial spillway but what it actually does is crack the very foundation of the dam holding Bill together. The series of events that follow are almost unavoidable in retrospect, Bill having allowed himself to be consumed by his own image, driven away from the world by his own fame trapped by his will to preserve his legacy is undone by a two day visit from an inquisitive photographer.

Scott has made every attempt to normalize Bill’s behaviour and gloss over the cracks in his psyche. During their dinner together Brita does not have some prepared attack on their living arrangements she simply asks the most rudimentary questions a slightly more than casual observer might raise. This line of questioning leads to a violent physical outburst from Bill pointing to the real turmoil in his soul, the tenacity of Scott and the strength of the partition between Karen and the real world. Scott has bought Bill time and Karen showed them how they could live in such a way to make it seem normal.

Without the forces of Scott and Karen, Bill cannot cope with his demons and finds an outlet in saving the prisoner. Bill quickly realizes however, that it isn’t the saving of the prisoner that matters to him it is the validation of his legacy intertwined with his own demise that replacing the prisoner offers that he seeks. Rashid will further immortalize Bill while also releasing him from the burden of his legacy. Bill sets out on his path of self destruction only to be mortally injured in a hit and run car accident. The running theme of the remainder of Bill’s adventure is that no matter the evidence provided to the contrary he is convinced he will meet the demise he has set out to find. Even in his dying Bill believes it will go like one of his stories, just the way he would have written it. His ego is his undoing and the inherent folly of man his ultimate demise, that the self will actually live forever,

Jean-Claude begins his part in the story viewing the world through the same self serving egotistical view that Bill never escapes. In the beginning Jean-Claude assumes he will survive, that survival is the only logical conclusion to his internment. As time goes on and he further experiences torture and captivity his world-view shifts and his drive becomes a list of once mores. If he could look at a woman just once more, or perhaps just her stockings it would help him survive a bit longer. If he could put into words his suffering it would all make sense. For Jean-Claude it isn’t about escaping his pain but making his pain mean something, anything at all besides simple cruel misfortune.

Jean-Claude struggles with no inner demons, he has real world antagonists.

These antagonists are personified in the boy. For Jean-Claude the boy is both paingiver and life preserver. The boy brings pain through torture and assault. These attacks could be ordered and methodical or what seems more likely is a warden abusing his ward simply because there is no one to care that he does. The other side of the coin that is the boy is the life giver. It is always the boy who provide food and water. Jean- Claude is hand fed like a baby and it is done in such a way that Jean-Claude must match his captors pace or choke. This pacing provides another facet to the control the boy has over Jean-Claude. Jean-Claude finds himself feeling empathy towards the boy and feeling that he himself is in fact just a materialization of the boy’s reality and not a person at all. Jean-Claude eventually sets his will to some final drive, that his pain must be for something and the only way to ensure it was all meaningful is to put it into words. It doesn’t matter to him if it is on a wet sheet of toilet paper written in crayon as Jean-Claude says “Only writing could soak up his loneliness and pain… Let him write ten words and he would come into being once again.”

(204)

Jean-Claude represents the enduring will of mankind. When stripped down of all its pretense there is in all of us the will to leave our mark. In Bill’s efforts to secure his immortality he stumbles vainly to a pauper's unnamed grave. Jean-Claude is given over to fundamentalist terrorists and it is never explicitly stated that he is killed but it can be inferred that this is the case. When Brita goes to Beirut a year after Bill dies of his injuries she asks after the fate of the young writer and we learn that he was traded as such things are since his death by the Maoist terrorists no longer carried any political power.

Bill and Jean-Claude meet similar fates. They both die in unspectacular ways and not to great political upheaval which was the intention of everyone involved in orchestrating first Jean-Claude’s capture and Bill’s trip to Beirut. Bill trapped inside himself and unable to escape what he has built himself up to be walks straight into death's embrace because he cannot see past his own ego. Jean-Claude well and truly trapped in a very physical sense of the word lives out his last days in a very different fashion. His unquenchable human spirit still strove to reach out further than his means would allow died striving for one more final thought to cast into eternity, a message in a bottle or even more simply a word or two etched out on a flimsy piece of scrap paper.

I firmly believe that Jean-Claude is the better man when comparing him to Bill. With all his fame and fortune Bill could not have been a more ineffectual person and he knew it, that is the thing he ran from hardest while also being the most honest truth he admitted to himself. He could not face it and that in the end consumed him. Jean-Claude struggled with stockholm syndrome and the inability to understand the why of his situation but he never lost sight of the thing that meant the most to him which was his writing and his will to write. I would very much have liked to see him delivered safely home and perhaps more so I would have liked to know exactly what his final words would have been.