Give a personal response to the
novel.
This novel for me was a stark confrontation with a topic
that I had heard about for years before. That being, what are we really, and
what does it matter what we do. In the case of this novel it represented human
kind, particularly the dead as meat, perishable meat, that must be buried,
frozen or burnt before the rot sets in. And as for the question about what does
it matter what we do, O’Brien presented for me that is does not matter what we
do in our life, there is no supreme purpose to life, only that we live and die,
we make contributions to society, but in the end we are all dead. This can be
related to a colony of ants, or a hive of bees, each individual creature has a
purpose, created by society, that they fulfil and when their time comes, they
die. How are we, the superior “human race”, any different to the ants that toil
in the dirt, serving society is all they know, and all we know, and maybe that
will change in the future, nobody knows, but I doubt that this will ever
change, we are who we are, and we cannot change that. As Linda stated, “we just
got to be ourselves” (Page 98).
