The Value of a Human Life

One of the panels I attended was titled "Wish You Were Here," but honestly I would have preferred the title Mind over Matter, because that was the main subject of all the papers presented. Almost coincidentally, three of the papers managed to very interestingly relate the power of the mind as a coping mechanism to femininity and to subversion. My friend Abby's paper on The Handmaid's Tale argued that even though the main character physically complied with all the harsh, demeaning laws of the totalitarian regime she lived in, her mental escapism was a valid way to subvert this regime. Another paper spoke of a novel called Players, in which the main character looks to nature as both a symbol of anarchy and as a place of refuge from postmodern boredom. Lastly, a paper on "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" spoke of Walter's daydreams as stemming from a fundamental dissatisfaction with his homogenized life and a desire to heroize himself. Jen's paper places the blame of Walter's discontentment on the narrow social definition of heroism. 

During the Q&A, one of the question's directed towards Jen's paper prompted an answer of "It all comes down to what Walter believes is a valuable human life." This sentence struck with me, both as relating to all of the papers on the panel but also to our class theme, Losing to Win. In Tyler Dearden's words, self-destruction is a mechanism by which one can entirely and completely give up one life in order to assume another. This definition raises the question for all of the protagonists of this semester: what do they constitute as a valuable human life? Like Walter, they certainly don't think their own life is a valuable one. However, unlike Walter, our characters are constricted to daydreaming; they can go to much greater (and much more dangerous) extents to try and swap out their life for another through the use of drugs, alcohol, and exorbitant amounts of money.