Post by I Lam on Nov 19, 2015 5:09:37 GMT
As expected of Murakami! Once again I'm left satisfied without at all understanding what I read. But I'll do my best.
The way I see it, the elephant is a metaphor for something important in people. The beginning part about the town's fight about the adoption of the old elephant, thrown away by the zoo system that no longer needed it, gave us a look at exactly how little they valued the actual life of an elephant (or any of the animals in the zoo for that matter); it was all about pragmatics: who will pay for it, will it benefit the already affluent town, etc. All in all, the existence of the elephant was but a simple problem once it ceased to serve the purpose of pleasing the public. Although the town took it in, eventually the initial wonder and curiosity died down, and although our narrator kept watch from the outside, the only bond the elephant truly had was with the keeper, and vice versa. So when the narrator spoke of the "different, chilling time flowing through the elephant house" (p 414), the statement came as hardly a surprise. After all, for the two lonely beings who only had each other inside a large lot isolated from the rest of the town, it was probably always that way. In a sense, all that happened was that something figurative became actualized. But of course, what with the whole spiel about balance, unity and the kitchin, we know that the elephant and its keeper are actually a piece of the town, or at least, its existence was a part of the balance in it, whether people realized this or not. But when the people became apathetic to it, its presence in this world stopped having any meaning, or purpose.
The cogwheel was taken out because it had been deemed unnecessary to the function of the system, and unsurprisingly, people begin to miss something only once they realize it's gone. The people feared, and didn't understand--how could something so big, shackled in place, like a heart in a rib cage, simply disappear? Well, if you think of the elephant as the town's (or past zoo visitors') collective feelings of sentimentalism that didn't belong under the category of 'pragmatic', you'd get a big entity that, over time, has whittled away (either into nothingness or it just left the town). And of course, you can't shackle up something like that, try as you might. And the night that the narrator brought up the case of the elephant in his pragmatic little man-woman conversation, it disrupted the new balance that had fallen into place, and ended in the failure of that transaction. In the end, it was like the narrator had lost the ability to desire, and seek personal pleasures. It's a scary description that he finally delivers about the unity sought after "in this kitchin we know as the world. Unity of design. Unity of color. Unity of function." In the pragmatic world, there is no need for individualism. So in conclusion, the disappearance of the elephant and his keeper was a metaphor for the disappearance of the very thing that, on an emotional level, separated humans from robots. And once this new order had fallen into place, there was no going back.
...So I guess this story is more or less a warning to/critique of modern society. Guard your Empathy & Co.!
Discussion: The narrator being the only one who saw the moments before the elephant's disappearance (and cared about it at all really), do you think he might have been able to stop it from happening? Did his inaction make him an accomplice to the crime?
The way I see it, the elephant is a metaphor for something important in people. The beginning part about the town's fight about the adoption of the old elephant, thrown away by the zoo system that no longer needed it, gave us a look at exactly how little they valued the actual life of an elephant (or any of the animals in the zoo for that matter); it was all about pragmatics: who will pay for it, will it benefit the already affluent town, etc. All in all, the existence of the elephant was but a simple problem once it ceased to serve the purpose of pleasing the public. Although the town took it in, eventually the initial wonder and curiosity died down, and although our narrator kept watch from the outside, the only bond the elephant truly had was with the keeper, and vice versa. So when the narrator spoke of the "different, chilling time flowing through the elephant house" (p 414), the statement came as hardly a surprise. After all, for the two lonely beings who only had each other inside a large lot isolated from the rest of the town, it was probably always that way. In a sense, all that happened was that something figurative became actualized. But of course, what with the whole spiel about balance, unity and the kitchin, we know that the elephant and its keeper are actually a piece of the town, or at least, its existence was a part of the balance in it, whether people realized this or not. But when the people became apathetic to it, its presence in this world stopped having any meaning, or purpose.
The cogwheel was taken out because it had been deemed unnecessary to the function of the system, and unsurprisingly, people begin to miss something only once they realize it's gone. The people feared, and didn't understand--how could something so big, shackled in place, like a heart in a rib cage, simply disappear? Well, if you think of the elephant as the town's (or past zoo visitors') collective feelings of sentimentalism that didn't belong under the category of 'pragmatic', you'd get a big entity that, over time, has whittled away (either into nothingness or it just left the town). And of course, you can't shackle up something like that, try as you might. And the night that the narrator brought up the case of the elephant in his pragmatic little man-woman conversation, it disrupted the new balance that had fallen into place, and ended in the failure of that transaction. In the end, it was like the narrator had lost the ability to desire, and seek personal pleasures. It's a scary description that he finally delivers about the unity sought after "in this kitchin we know as the world. Unity of design. Unity of color. Unity of function." In the pragmatic world, there is no need for individualism. So in conclusion, the disappearance of the elephant and his keeper was a metaphor for the disappearance of the very thing that, on an emotional level, separated humans from robots. And once this new order had fallen into place, there was no going back.
...So I guess this story is more or less a warning to/critique of modern society. Guard your Empathy & Co.!
Discussion: The narrator being the only one who saw the moments before the elephant's disappearance (and cared about it at all really), do you think he might have been able to stop it from happening? Did his inaction make him an accomplice to the crime?