Short Paper #1: Regret

In several of the novels we have read so far this semester there are characters whose actions are driven by a sense of regret that they cannot shake or find amends for. Although each character’s circumstances are different each one’s regret also has something to do with relationships, specifically family relationships.  The most obvious examples of this form of regret are seen in Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, where almost all of the characters experience feelings of regret. There are also examples of regret found in Arabian Nights and Days by Naguib Mahfouz and in My Michael by Amos Oz.

After the mother disappears in Please Look After Mom both her children and her husband experience feelings of regret over the way they treated her while she was alive and in their lives. Her oldest son Hyong-chol regrets that he gave up his dream to become a prosecutor after he failed his college entrance exam, because he had promised his mother that he would become a prosecutor. He regretted this, because the failure put a distance between him and his mother and he stopped caring or thinking about his mother like he should have. This distancing manifests itself in his regret over the part he played in his mother’s disappearance. “Instead of going to Seoul Station, Hyong-chol went to a sauna near work. As he sweated in the sauna, which he often visited the day after he drank too much, Father was getting on the train without Mom” (Shin, 86). Hyong-chol believes that if he had cared enough about his mother she never would have been lost, because he would have met his parents at Seoul Station.

Hyong-chol’s sister Chi-hon also had very similar feelings. He says, “After Mom went missing, his sister muttered to him, ‘maybe I’m being punished…’” (Shin, 73) for ignoring Mom.  His sister tells him that once they find Mom she is going to get married and stop going on airplanes, because Mom always wanted her to get married and hated when she would travel on planes. Chi-hon says, “After Mom went missing I realized that there’s an answer to everything. I could have done everything she wanted me to. It wasn’t important I don’t know why I got under her skin over things like that” (Shin, 114). Chi-hon regrets making waves about things that did not really matter with her mother instead of being respectful and doing things her mother’s way just to show her how much she cared about her.

Like his son, the father also feels regret both about how he treated his wife while she was alive and about the part that he played in her disappearance. “Before she went missing, [he] spent [his] days without thinking about her. When [he] did think about her, it was to ask her to do something, or to blame her or ignore her” (Shin, 129). He regrets that he “lived [his] entire life heaping all of [his] pain onto [his] wife” (Shin, 168). He wishes that he could go back and buy her medicine to make her feel better when she was sick or even just pay attention to her and listen to her when she talked. After her disappearance he realizes how little he really knew about his wife while she was alive and he blames himself for her disappearance, because he never listened to her. She was always telling him to slow down and walk next to her, but he never listened and if he had she never would have gotten lost. He says, “Since [his] wife has gone missing, [his] heart feels as if it will explode every time [he] thinks about [his] fast gait” (Shin, 149).

The mother also feels regret after her death regarding the way that she treated her children. She regrets the distance between her oldest son and herself as much as he does and she wishes that she could go back and support him in his choice to not retake the exam. She also has a lot of regret associated with her relationship with her eldest daughter. She was angry with her daughter for choosing to become a mother with three children instead of pressuring a career. After she dies she sits outside her daughters house in a tree and talks to her daughter and her grandchildren. She says to her daughter “Please forgive me for the face I made when you came back to Seoul with the third baby in your arms” (Shin, 190). Not only does she regret that she tried to force her own dreams for her daughter on her, but she also regrets that she never showed an interest in her grandchildren. She says to them, “When you children were born, I cared more about your mom then about you three” (Shin, 189). She regrets not caring about the children, because now she realizes that those children are a part of her daughter and the best way she could have shown her daughter she cared was to show an interest in her daughter’s children.

The examples from Please Look After Mom are all interconnected and it is therefore easy to see how each person’s regret is related to the family dynamic. Arabian Nights and Days by Naguib Mahfouz also has several examples of regret in relation to family, but these examples are not connected as cohesively.  After Gamasa al-Bulti is executed he miraculously returns in another body as Abdullah the porter. Immediately following this transformation it says that “his astonishment at his appearance did not cease, neither did his sadness for his family” (Mahfouz, 51).  He feels regret over his actions, because his family lost their home and their standing in society due to his treason. He moves into the same apartment building that they are staying in so that he can still be apart of their lives. However, he voices on several occasions his regret over not being able to do more for his family or be closer to them. He also wishes he had done certain things while he was ‘still alive’, like marry Husniya as a second wife. Shahriyar regrets his past actions of sleeping with virgins every night and then killing them, because of how it affects his current marriage with Shahrzad and his relationship to his son.  Shahrzad tells him continuously that “true repentance wipes away the past” (Mahfouz, 217). However, he still feels so much shame and regret over his past actions and how they affect his family that he leaves the palace. He believes that his wife, child and country will all be better without his corruptness and leaves in the night.

There is also one concrete example of regret in relation to family in My Michael by Amos Oz. Both Hannah and Michael show regret over the way their relationship has turned out. However, neither of them really identifies where it went wrong or exactly what their regret steams from. At one point Hannah describes their relationship saying, “My husband and I are like two strangers who happen to meet coming out of a clinic where they have received treatment involving some physical unpleasantness. Both embarrassed, reading each other’s minds, conscious of an uneasy, embarrassing intimacy, wearily groping for the right tone in which to address each other now” (Oz, 224). There is awkwardness in Michael and Hannah’s relationship, which they both seem to regret. They want to know each other better, but they do not know how. Hannah sums up her feeling of regret beautifully when she says, “Will we die, Michael, you and I, without touching each other so much as once? Touching. Merging. You don’t understand. Losing ourselves in each other. Melting. Fusing. Growing into one another. Helplessly coalescing” (Oz, 228). Hannah regrets their lack of emotional intimacy as husband and wife.

Although the circumstances are different in each novel there is a common theme of regret woven throughout them. Also in all the example this theme of regret is in relation to interactions within the family context. Regret is a common human emotion and few human beings manage to escape from its grasp. This may be the reason that it is such a prominent theme in contemporary world literature, as seen through these examples. 

My Michael Reflection Paper

In Amos Oz’s novel My Michael Oz depicts a struggling relationship between a young husband and wife. He explores many tangible and intangible reasons why their relationship struggles. However, the reason that stuck out the most to me is summed up through a statement their child Yair makes to his mother. He says, “For you everything is possible. Daddy takes care what he says and he doesn’t talk from his thoughts. Only from his brains” (p. 181).

Throughout the novel Hannah is continuously daydreaming. At one point she reflects on an attack of diphtheria that she had when she was young saying. “When I recovered…I experienced a feeling of exile. I had lost my power of alchemy, the ability to make my dreams carry me over the dividing line between sleeping and waking” (p.17). She continues to attempt to lose her grip on reality through reading books or spending time staring out the windows daydreaming. We, as readers, see Hannah’s fascination with fiction through her continuous reference to books she has read. She distances herself from reality by comparing and replacing reality with elements of fiction. When she goes to a lecture with Michael she describes the lecturer saying, “by the dim light of the magic lantern I was free too to contemplate the features, the arm, the pointer of the ancient lecturer, who looked like an illustration in on e of the old books I loved. I remembered the dark woodcuts in Moby Dick” (p. 4). Later in the novel, Hannah attempts to explain her side of a disagreement to Michael in terms of the story of Cinderella. She says, “I tell you, Michael, that prince was an utter fool and Cinderella was out of her mind. Maybe that was why they suited each other and lived happily ever after” (p. 165). 

Michael does not understand the Cinderella analogy that Hannah uses. This lack of communication is a constant theme throughout the novel. At one point Hannah tries to compliment Michael’s research piece and he takes her compliment badly saying that, “He was sorry…that he wasn’t a poet, that he couldn’t dedicate a poem to [her] instead of a dry piece of research. Everyone does what he is capable of” (p. 118). Michael is grounded in reality. He has spent is life studying and researching the physical world around him. There is not any room in his mind for imagination. As his son says, “he doesn’t talk from his thoughts. Only from his brains” (p. 181). This stark difference between Michael and Hannah’s takes on reality is one of the largest causes of tension in their marriage. They do not understand each other, because their passions speak different languages. On one of Hannah and Michael’s first dates Michael takes Hannah for a taxi ride. Hannah describes their conversation saying, “He said ‘Pre-Cambrian,’ ‘Cambrian,’ ‘metamorphic rocks,’ ‘igneous rocks,’ ‘tectonics.’ For the first time then I felt that inner tension which I still feel whenever I hear my husband talking his strange language.

I do not think that couples must have exactly the same interests for their relationships to work. Actually quite the contrary, I believe that differences can be healthy in a relationship. What I was really struck with was how Oz portrayed this conflict of passions and lack of understanding. He shows the reader the importance of communication, by emphasizing how little they understood each other’s passions and how much this in turn affected their relationship. I believe that Oz intends for the reader to see the necessity of focusing on learning about others instead of focusing on ourselves. I personally see how many of the conflicts I have had in relationships could have been avoided if both parties had made an effort to understand each other’s passions and speak each other’s figurative languages. 

Arabian Nights and Days Response

One of the questions that human beings have wrestled with from the beginning of time is the dotted line between justice and injustice. In Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Arabian Nights and Days he uses countless stories and examples to explore this question. I took a class last semester called “In Search of Justice” and left the class feeling like all it did was raise unanswerable questions.  I came out of the class with less confidence in my personal beliefs about justice than I went into the class with. I therefore found Mahfouz’s discussion and representations of justice and injustice particularly fascinating. 

            I believe that it is often hard to distinguish the difference between unlawful acts and unjust acts. Mahfouz played on this dynamic repeatedly in the novel and forced the reader to try and determine the ‘righteousness’ of a persons acts for him or her self instead of making it obvious who in the novel is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad’. If I attempted to discuss all of the dimensions that Mahfouz uses in the novel to explore the idea of Justice this paper would probably be longer than the novel itself. I am therefore going to focus in on the two ideas that stuck out to me as the most powerful and interesting. First the idea of what I would call ‘Robin Hood Justice’ and second the idea of justice in relationship to divine orchestration.

            I would define ‘Robin Hood Justice’ as not only robbing from the rich to give to the poor, but also as doing unlawful or ‘wrong’ acts for the right reasons or with righteous motives.  At one point the Skeikh describes Fadil Sanaan saying, “He is waging war against error to the extent of his ability” (p. 167). I found this statement very interesting, because the Skeikh does not exactly condemn or applaud Fadil’s actions, but he does seem to think him a righteous man, because he has the right motives. I found it interesting that it is possible for a persons motives in doing an action to be more important than the act itself in determining how just or unjust the action was.  In the beginning sections of the novel Gamasa al-Bulti assassinates the governor of the quarter, but instead of feeling remorse for the murder he tells “himself that he was now practicing a form of worship whose purity would wash clean the filth of long years of dissipation” (p. 47).  This section is reinforced in the following two sections where Gamasa al-Bulti returns as the Porter and as Abdullah and continues to carry out murders, supposable for the good of the quarter. These sections caused me to reflect at great length on whether or not Gamasa al-Bulti was a good, righteous man or an evil man. He was removing corrupt and evil men from power, which is itself a good thing to do and he also seemed to have pure motives with most of his killings. However, at the same time he was breaking the law and murdering men.  I personally think that unlawful acts can be just acts, however, I do not know if there is a way to draw a line as to what makes an act just or unjust. Pondering these ideas makes me grateful that we as Christians are not required to judge others and are instead suppose to live by the laws set down for us by the scriptures and leave judgment of others to God. If motives really do weigh into the justice of an act, we do not have any capability to judge that.

            There is also a strong theme of characters actions being controlled by God or gods in the novel. The characters often blame their actions on supernatural interference and leave many things in the hands of the supernatural. Almost all of the many murders and assassinations that take place are done in the name of God and often even considered acts of worship. Right before Fadil is executed he says to Sahloul “I want justice” (p. 193). Sahloul responds to this by simply saying, “God does what He wishes” (p. 193). This simple statement really struck me, because although the characters had been heavily calling upon God for the entire novel, I had never considered how God might play out his justice in what he allows to happen. When I think of God’s judgment and justice I tend to think of it in terms of judgment day and do not really think about how God may be actively playing out his justice in our daily lives. However, this idea also raises the question of why God allows injustices if he is acting out his judgment and justice in todays world.

            Over all Mahfouz did an incredible job of raising questions to engage his readers. Especially in respects to justice issues.   I do not feel as though I came away from reading the novel with any more answers, but I also think that sometimes realizing how little we really understand is more beneficial than gaining understanding.