Gerald Brunell
12\9\04
Communication and Thought
Running Away: The Great Escape
“This town, don’t feel mine,
I'm fast to get away, far!”
-Deftones
“Be Quiet and Drive”
Why does humanity have a need for escape? Humanity has always had the need and has given into it often. It is a need that is in every race, sex, and culture. In all of the books we have read in this class escape has been the biggest similarity between all the books, but what are the reasons that ignite the desire to leave your current condition, jump out into a dangerous world, and try to find something to fulfill yourself that you may not even find at all? For Sal Paradise it was the need for an ecstatic experience, for Huckleberry Fin it was a need to find freedom and the escape of the oxymoronically morality of the south, for Tommo is was a horrible living condition and curiosity for a new culture, and for Chris McCandales it was the need for spirituality in a world lacking it.
Sal Paradise grew up in a time of emptiness. The Second World War had just ended with the introduction of a new weapon that threatened the future of humanity, the atomic bomb, and a cold war was beginning with the only other super power in the world, the Soviet Union. It is hard to find purpose in a world that could practically end at any time. In Sal’s personal life he had just divorced his wife and it made him feel like “everything was dead”. Sal needed a vacation from reality. He needed to experience an ecstasy that would be induced by an extreme, whether it is from happiness or complete depravation, it didn’t really matter. The way he was living was a cushy, middle-class, status-quo life that kept all his feelings at a baseline. He needed a way out of his average life. He met Dean Moriarty who lived his life in the ecstatic experience that Sal sorely lacked. This is why Sal went on the road with Dean, to escape his life of monotony. Sal could not find the feeling he needed where he was. There was no other way out of his problem of numbness but to leave and throw his fate in the hands of the road.
Huckleberry Fin’s character was chaotic. He did not always want to adhere to the rules put on him by society, but he couldn’t fight it, he was just a child. Society took him away from his abusive father and put him into a widower’s home where he would be “civilized”, which should be the last word to define Huck. The only way he could escape the boring reality was playing with Tom Sawyer, but his imagination of fake adventures could only carry him so far for so long. He needed some actual physical adventure and danger. Huck fled from his abusive father and found real freedom until Jim came back into his life. He then had a more important mission; help Jim get to his freedom while finding his own. Huck’s reason to be on the river (the roadway of the time) was his rejection of the oxymoronically morality of the old south. Huck had his own grasp of morality that was not the accepted one of the time. He found slavery to be immoral eventually and because of it rejected civilization as a whole. Huck’s journey for justice and freedom was worth any of the risks that he would come across. Objectivism
Chris McCandless was a prophet to some while a fool to others. He, like Huck and Sal, gave into the urge of escape. His reasoning was more spiritual then any thing else, though he did have some other reasons. He had just graduated college and was left with only two options, go back home, get a job, and live a life in support of the status quo, or go some place and find out what fate has decided him to do. He chose the latter and, unlike Sal and Huck, it cost him his life.
What chose did he have though? Chris rejected society and was flat out disgusted by it. The consumerism and lack of social justice was unbearable to him. Also he was having problems with his family’s (or lack of) history and accepting his father’s mistakes to such a point where the first option he had, go home, was not even bearable to his sanity and thus not an option at all. Chris, heavily influenced by writers like Tolstoy, London and Therou, decided he would live out his dream of being alone and living off the land in Alaska. He rejected mostly all forms of government, finding them to be getting in the way of his spiritual mission. He only carried what was on his back and rejected most help from people he met. He lived a life that was brutal to his body but very healthy to his notion of spirituality which in the end killed him.
Tommo was practically forced to leave his current condition. His was forced out by the unbearable living conditions put on him by his corrupt captain and leader. In modern times it would be like fleeing a county because of a tyrannical dictator. His curiosity of the island of the Typee helped finalize the decision to jump ship and throw his destiny in the hands of fate. Tommo’s story was unique from everyone else’s because of its ending. After living in a lazy and primitive society, Tommo’s appreciation of what he had originally grew. He ended up leaving what some would consider a paradise for what he knew best and was most accustomed to.
All of the characters in the books we have read had the need to leave. They all needed to find something to fulfill themselves because they could not find the fulfillment they needed where they were currently. Whether it was for basic freedom, horrible leadership, spirituality, or an experience to take you out of mundane reality, escape was the only way to do it.
