WHOSE REALITY

Contents
1. Which texts to mention (other than enduring love)
2. Which background story?
3. How will I address the 3 areas of Whose Reality?
4. How will I reference the additional texts?

1. Which texts to mention (other than enduring love)

- Lolita (Narbakov)
- Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
- Plato's Cave (Plato)

2. Which background story?

- Parallel of the balloon accident
- Fake Love
- Depressed Teenage

3. How will I address the 3 areas of Whose Reality? (Memory, Perception, )

- Memory: Different accounts of the same incident; living in the mind;
- Perception:
-

4. Important Parts of Enduring Love

- Clarissa's Letter 216/19
- Jed's Letter 244/5
-Appendix in general 233?

Depressed Teenager (girl)

-Bell jar parallel ()
-Parents apparently don't love her (but really, they do) [perception]
-Raped? (but he doesn't think so – he thinks she concented...court case?)
[memory, perception]
-
“What people remember shapes their understanding of themselves
and their world.”

[A testimony from the main suspect of a potential murder]

I am an ordinary girl. I am. I promise. I hate my parents and I cry myself to
sleep every other night. I pretend to be a good girl, but in reality, I'm not. I
take drugs and I've had more boyfriends than my father has hair on his body –
and he's not even balding yet. My favourite food ever since I can remember is
pizza and my favourite book the Bell Jar, except that I hate how it ends – I
think she's weak; I would never succumb to the delirium of an idle mind. I
always have something to do, places to be, people to meet, yada yada yada. I
want to be an actress. I have the looks for it and I'm fairly talented. Everyone
thinks so. My drama teacher says I'm the best student he's ever seen. He even
gave me a private lesson on my monologue free of charge. Well, almost free.

I don't know what's real anymore, so I resort to literature and art for an
explanation of the curious events that happen in my life. My parents were good
to me, at least, in the traditional understanding of the word. I was never
wanting of anything, and it was always the best for their darling child. I wish
they'd actually cared about me, rather than trying to shape me into a little
barbie doll. I wish they'd actually listened to me, like when I told them I
didn't want to be dressed in pretty clothes; or when I told them that I didn't
want to run down to the milkbar to buy myself an ice-cream while they had sex on
living-room couch because the lighting was better there. Or when I told them I
didn't want to be...touched...like that.

Anyway, that not why I'm here, is it? So why am I standing here before you now?
As far as I understand it, it is because today my dignity stands on trial. I am
accused of murder. The murder of Jimmy Balley. The facts? Jimmy was born in
Perth, Australia. He was an average boy in an average suburban town; he played
footy in the winter and cricket in the summer; I remember having the misfortune
of meeting him in the summer of '99 when I moved schools because my parents
suddenly decided that we would all move to a new country. He always tried to sit
next to me in chemistry, even when we had different lab partners; I just though
he, you know, liked me. A lot of people like me. It's understandable. But this
was different. This was creepy. He used to perform these creepy rituals, and
once, I caught him whispering my name. I shudder at the remembrance of it. When
I asked him what he was doing, he said he was “blessing [his] maker for sending
[him] someone who loved [him] as much as [I] do”. I told him to stay away from
me and politely suggested that he was a creep. He seemed upset and winced “don't
do that Erin. Don't build this gap between us. We are meant to be together. He
sent you to me so that we could be happy.” I was perplexed, to say the least; I
didn't understand; he reminded me a character called Jed that I had been
studying. Jed had a very rare medical condition which caused him to think that
Joe, the main character of the novel, was in love with him and no matter how
hard Joe tried, he couldn't convince him otherwise. I wondered if Jimmy had the
same condition; I guess we'll never know now.

Afterwards, I tried to avoid him but he kept popping up in all sorts of

places; outside my locker, in my kitchen, at the dinner table, in my bedroom. My
mother didn't listen to me when I told her he was a freak and that I was scared;
she just said “nonsense! He's a lovely young boy! You two make a lovely couple”.
We definitely weren't a couple. I couldn't stand the sight of him, but he'd
sneak up on me and then suddenly we were holding hands. I know its sounds bad
like I'm the crazy one, but that's how it happened. You don't understand how
hard it is for a girl to say no; he was very convincing. None of my friends
understood why I let him go on pretending we were a couple but I simply couldn't
stop him. His manipulative manoeuvres triggered little chemicals in my brain
that simply paralysed me, and I just didn't know what to do.

After that things got worse. We went away on a camping trip and he ended up
sharing a tent with me. One morning I woke up naked next to him. That was too
much. What could I have thought? My mind jumped to the worst conclusion. I was
so sure of it. I was also sure that nobody would believe me. I finally
understood how Blanche Dubois must have felt after that horrible wrong was done
to her and nobody believed her. I was angry and humiliated. That's when it
happened. I grabbed some clothes and ran out of the tent crying. I was half way
across the bridge when I felt some iron grip hands grab me and knock the breath
out of me. I heard whispering in my ear; I assume it was Jimmy trying to calm me
down but I was hysterical. I can't overemphasise that I was hysterical...like
Humbert Humbert in Lolita when he's trying to convince the jury that it was
Lolita who seduced him and not the other way around. Have you read the book?
Humbert Humbert is this paedophile who falls in love with a twelve year old and
then tries to 'get with her'. Anyway, I tried to break free and suddenly Jimmy
was falling off the bridge. Nobody believed me when I told them it was an
accident. Just like nobody believed me when I told them he was a creepy stalker;
just like nobody believed me when I told them about my daddy. Unfortunately for
me, medical science could not provide justifiable evidence.

So why am I really standing here before you today? Because today my sanity
stands on trial. When I was 12, they called me crazy. When Jimmy wouldn't leave
me alone, they called me crazy. So now, when I say that Jimmy's death was an
accident, I defy you to tell me that I'm crazy. Tell me that I pushed him off.
Tell me that I seduced him. Tell me that my daddy's an upstanding young citizen.
Put me in an asylum like some Ester Greenwood. Go on. I dare you to.

[she breaks into tears]

Sometimes I think that maybe they're all right and that I am the crazy one. I
never understood why . Maybe my parents didn't touch me as a little girl; maybe
Jimmy wasn't a crazy stalker; maybe he didn't “accidentally” fall off a cliff;
maybe...

[she lifts up her sleeve, as a sly grin spreads across her face]

...this a scar is from where he clawed at me in a desperate attempt to hold on

to dear life as I pushed him over and spat in his face. Then again, maybe not.
Gosh, I feel like a regular Joe Rose; nobody believed him either until Jed
turned up at his house and threatened to knife his girl. Ladies and Gentlemen of
the Jury, these [lifting her pant legs] are 8 year old scars from where my
father bound me to a bed. This scar [lifting her hair to reveal her neck] is
from where he accidentally bit down hard. Yes, I killed Jimmy. But what choice
did I have?

[Erin Bourke was convicted for the murder of 19 young men and 3 older men. She
was then admitted to a lunatic asylum and after months of therapy it was
revealed and understood that this earlier teenage experience was the traumatic
event that shaped her hatred for teenage boys and older men]

This imaginary piece is set in the context of a court case being analysed by
psychologists. It is specifically geared at psychologists who study how people
become serial killers. Most of the language is a transcript of a monologue. It
is slightly romanticised but natural. This is because the main character is a
normal person, and no fancy or formal language is required for giving a
testimony. A sort of story telling pace and suspense is employed to add some
authenticity to her testimony and to highlight how she is trying to manipulate
the jury.
This piece directly draws on ideas from Enduring Love in several ways. Firstly,
Jimmy is hypothesised to have a similar condition to Jed's, to the extent that
he is also using Religion as a justification and evidence. Secondly, Erin
briefly talks about “little chemicals...” which draws on Joe Rose's analytical
style where everything is boiled down to the little details of how humans work;
I didn't go in depth here because it would have been inappropriate for someone
like Erin to have a strong scientific background. Thirdly, the idea of nobody
believing Erin but her actually being correct is a parallel to Joe Rose's
situation.

The main theme of this piece is how a lack of faith in a person can have drastic
consequence. Nobody believes Erin (the speaking voice of this piece) when she
claims to have been wronged and this leads to her demise into doubting herself
and then to her descent into serial killing when she feels that she has no way
out. This draws a direct parallel to Enduring Love where nobody believes what
Joe says, which drives him to doubt himself, and then to acquire a gun with the
intention of “protecting” himself and his family.

This piece addresses the prompt by showing how what Erin remembered, such as
being sexually abused, shaped her into a serial killer and how the stark
contrast between that and what the people surrounding her remembered or chose to
remember, i.e. that she wasn't, misshaped her into a dysfunctional member of
society. There are subtle allusions to her memory of the Bell Jar shaping her
into a resolute woman who deals with her own problems by taking action, and her
parents misunderstanding of her leading to her being trapped, and her
misunderstanding of Jimmy leading to her fear and resentment of him just as Joe
feared Jed, and how her new found understanding of how being Blanche Dubois felt
after being raped shaped her to take action and tipped her over the edge to
become a serial killer.

address prompt
audience
purpose
language
form

Context?
Imaginary (for the romantic language)
Form (Psychology journal on a testimony at a trial [Enduting Love on Shark's
Net)
Language (romantic)