Movie the Matrix and Octavia Butler's Dawn

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Movie the Matrix and Octavia Butler's Dawn

When I first announced to my parents that I was going to marry my current wife, the first words out of my father’s mouth were, “But she’s from another culture.” My father and mother, although being generally good people, are the products of an older system of beliefs. It is the matrix I was raised with, and that dictated my earlier learning experience. Fortunately for me, I chose to risk alienating my parents, and told them that if they ever mentioned “different cultures” to me again, it would be the last time we would be on speaking terms. I chose to ignore the matrix I was presented with, and the happiness and peace of mind that came from that decision have shaped my life ever since. I share this example because it is the key point of what I want the reader to understand from the comparison in this paper. It is a comparison between two choices made by two different primary players from the movie The Matrix and Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn.

There are some very startling similarities in the clash of matrices portrayed by the movie The Matrix and Dawn. On the surface the two works might seem to be addressing different topics, but the books have a common theme, and when the two works are analyzed in-depth, the parallels become readily apparent. The Matrix is about the clash between machines and humanity, while Dawn is about an alien race that decides to trade the survival of humanity for the genetic traits they can use from the human species. But at the heart of both struggles, there is a main character set between two startlingly different Matrices, or patterns of existing, and it is up to them to make the critical decision between which reality will continue.

The Matrix...

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...world gives us, or do we form our own? For each of us, our binary opposite choices will be slightly different, but we will encounter them for the rest of our lives. We must determine early what our choice will be, so that when these choices do come, our answers will be determined by the matrix we have created. It is when we are comfortable with the reality we have defined that we pass to the upper levels of mental cognition and self-awareness. Whether it is choosing the person we are going to marry, deciding what our career will be, or finding a religion that we feel is right, we must choose the matrix that we have built on our own thoughts and interpretations. Only then will we know ourselves, and feel that we have made the best decisions for our lives and our system of existence.

Works Cited

Butler, Octavia. Dawn. New York, NY: Time Warner Books, 1988.

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