Drugs, Destruction, and Discovery

Going down the rabbit hole is a really scary thing. When I think of going down the rabbit hole I think of entering a scary place that you really want to escape from. But this place is one that you really need to experience.

You know the cliché “if I had to do it all over again I wouldn’t change a thing”, I feel like it applies to this topic. Going down the rabbit hole will take you to your darkest places, places of self-destruction. These lows are essential to self-discovery and for my paper I want to explore how self-destruction is necessary to reach self-discovery. Sounds familiar… oh right our class is called Losing to Win! Well at least I have a lot of material to work with.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night fits really nicely with this theme. Looking into the drug abuse and the alcoholism that plagues the entire family can be seen as the self-destruction of the family. Where can we find the positives in this? Have these people won or are they really just losers? Are they stuck in the rabbit hole never able to get back out?

I’d also be very interested in writing about Fight Club. Although we haven’t watched it yet I think Tyler Durden shows the self-destruction of a person in a very clear yet very unconventional way. Exploring the downward spiral of a person’s life and trying to find how this destruction breeds new life, and how the character wouldn’t change a thing if he had to do it all over again is a theme extremely prevalent in Fight Club, and is exhibited in not only the destruction of the narrator’s personal life, but also in the destruction of the world around him. 

How can we escape the destruction? Should we escape it? Would we do it all over again? These are the questions I think of and will want to answer in the conference paper.

-Ameet