hard boiled wonderland at the end of the world

“No two human beings are alike it’s a question of identity. One thing seems certain though: Murakami is challenging our understanding of our own identity and existence. Both narrators experience their minds being taken from them, but as the novel progresses, readers can sense the doubles Murakami has placed in the text to shed light on the human consciousness… The Dreamreader and the Town seem to be representations of the Calcutec’s subconscious. Both worlds carry an eerie feeling to them, but the Dreamreader’s world feels more dream-like and bizarre with mindless people walking around the walled town. Readers are first introduced to the Calcutec who works for the System in Tokyo recruited to work for a scientist, but shortly after, we gain access to the Dreamreader who arrives to a town where he must be separated from his shadow. In this novel, readers go on the adventure of realizing the chapters alternate between two different worlds and narrators-but are they completely separate? I’ll need a few more reads to tell you for sure (and maybe not even then), but I’m not certain they are. I think it matches well with the imagination required for the journey through alternating perspectives and settings, and we see components of Murakami’s novel clearly represented: the brain, the skull, the two separate but connected figures… All of this resonates deeply with my current understanding of The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Finding memories, he argues, is the key to undoing the consciousness sealed off in the narrator’s mind.In the running theme of including artwork associated with the novels I’ve read, I thought I’d feature this piece by Laura Spencer Illustrates because of how fantastical it is. 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 at the end of the world