Friday, November 20, 2009

Frankl and Literature for Me

Ok, so the other day in class we talked about Frankl's Three Stages to readjust to freedom and his tragic triad however, I will just focus on the Three Stages to readjust to freedom. The first he says is shock, which is basically where an individual has forgotten how to be and what it means to be free. The second of which is apathy, which is basically when the individual forgets how to feel and express emotion - their sole purpose is to survive. And the third, which is de personalization/disillusionment, which is when an individual has been scarred. I look at these three stages and the first thing that came to mind for me was when you are learning how to read. When you learn to read as a young child you pick up a book entitled "Harry." The very first line of the book and probably one of only 10 lines in the book is "Harry loves to walk his dog." These books have no protagonist, antagonist, climax, etc, however, we, as young children read them and enjoy them. Once I learned all of the names for the different parts to a novel such as the setting, or the antagonist and the protagonist, "shock" comes into play. My freedom of loving the novel for a novel and the characters for simply characters, and where they live for their house have all been construed. I can only look at the characters and the role they play as good guy or villain, when they say where they grow up the word setting pops into my head and forces me to relate everything they are doing to: time period, location, etc, etc. I have forgotten what it means to read a book for a book. Once apathy sets in, I can no longer enjoy the book at all. Every book that I read after this is simply because I have to, not for enjoyment. And thirdly, I have been scarred because of the simple fact that I no longer want to read books now because I remember what's going to happen anyway. I'm going to pick it up, thinking I want to read it, and ulitimately get lost in the "english" of the book, and put it down never to be read.
This was the first thing I thought about when we were going over Frankl in class....I was sitting in my seat and I said "wow...that's how I feel about books." So I decided to share my example on the blog....

^_^

1 comment:

  1. I feel like Frankl's Three Stages (in a smaller context than what he originally had referred to them in) can be related to exactly what you are saying. It is the knowledge of something that can put one into shock and the enjoyment that was originally felt is lost forever. One's perspective will never be the same. This can happen without one's complete realization and I think thats when the crisis then occurs with the recognition of their new found knowledge.

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