The other day, I happened to be glancing over the schedule and I noticed that we’d be talking about Survivor this Friday. And just at that moment, I immediately remembered that I had wanted to right a very brief but contemplative blog post about that one time that we read a few pages of Survivor together as a class. I remember Beth saying that Survivor is the most allegorical novel of Butler’s Patternist Series which makes it so much easier (and fun) to infer parallelisms. Yet, the parallel that came to me troubles me more than anything else, even if I find it very intriguing. On page 36, in the Survivor packet that we were given before Spring Break, there is a short scene in which Jules, Alanna, and Neila come across a distorted corpse in a sealed compartment on the very ship that they had flown in on, “It was the body of a young man, dressed in the bright-colored style of the city of Forsyth. His body was short and squat and his head large. His forehead bulged strangely on one side and seemed almost sunken on the other. His mouth was slack and half open, drooling…To Neila and Alanna, he said, ‘There are all kinds of slaves.'”  Continue reading A Very Troubling & Allegorical Parallelism →

During our discussion in which we were to place the blame of the microbe epidemic on a specific character in Clay’s Ark, many of us pointed out Eli’s disastrous plan to keep the disease contained within a small settlement; every now and then infecting and adding new people into the fold. But it was Kayla’s comparison of the Clay’s Ark disease to AIDS that truly piqued my interest. In fact, I was quite upset that I had never made the parallel whilst I was reading the novel. As many of you know, AIDS when not combated with the proper therapy and medicine can kill rather quickly. Looking back, I can’t help but think of Eli as he attempted to help newcomers with proper treatment and training. His insightful knowledge of the microbe disease helped him keep his people alive and even proved to keep Keira alive when her survival was doubtful.

In 2013, the movie Dallas Buyers Club, briefly detailing Ron Woodroof’s fight against AIDS and prejudice through an underground medicinal market for individuals with HIV/AIDS,
premiered at theaters across the country and garnered commercial and critical success. Continue reading Hero? Villain? Neither? →