hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world

Otherwise he would've probably gone crazy knowing he was actually stuck in his own head for ever.Īnother interesting point is the unicorn skull. To cope with this contradiction the subconscious just created the illusion of a possible excape and the illusion of free will. Unless you specifically trained for that (lucid dreaming), realizing you're dreaming is traumatic for the brain, it can't keep up with the simulation and forces you to wake up. The dream reader and his shadow already realized the world was fake and that all the people there were empty (just a product of the subconscious). I think that finally finding an escape was just a way of the subconsious to cope with the situation: 'there is an exit, I just decided to stay here on my will'. As we know the main character peculiarity is that his subconscious is incredibly consistent and this allowed him to survive the operation, while the others' brain shut down because they couldn't cope with the contradictions.

My theory is that this was never a possibility, as the old guy said the end of the world was inevitable. It is heavily implied that if the dream reader would have jumped into the lake the second switch would have gone back to the originary position and he would have continued living like he did before the shuffling. Finding memories, he argues, is the key to undoing the consciousness sealed off in the narrator’s mind.Okay, so what is the meaning of the shadow leaving the end of the world? And why the dream reader decides to stay? Yet, the narrator believes that, even without his shadow, “little by little, I will recall things And as I remember, I may find the key to my own creation, and to its undoing” (399). The shadow says, “I got most of our memories, but what am I supposed to do with them? In order to make sense, we’d have to be put back together, which is not going to happen” (247). The narrator in the end of the world is separated from his shadow, who holds their memories in the Shadow Grounds and later escapes through the Southern Pool with them. The shuffling surgery causes him to have false memories and lose some brain space that held memories.

Forget the end of the world, I was ready to reclaim my whole self” (239). The hard-boiled narrator wants to get his “stolen memories back and live. Both narrators suffer from memory alteration. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World raises many questions about the relationship between memory and identity.

Hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world