Escape from Spiderhead was a fast read. This chapter had a binary between Jeff and Abnesti. Although Jeff resisted Albnesti's control every step of the way, similar to Allison from the chapter Victory Lap, there was no way to escape. That is, until Jeff takes the darkest and possibly the only way out of Spiderhead.
I consider a person's mind to be the one true thing sheltered and private from the outside world. The idea of temporary, but intense manipulation of feelings, perceptions, and even vocabulary is disturbing to me. One short paragraph that made my spine tingle was on page 64. When Jeff was undecisive about which girl to give Darkenfloxx Albensti asked him, "Do you feel jerked around because you still have feelings of love for one of the girls? That would need to be noted. Anger? Possessiveness? Residual sexual longing?". The word residual has a negative connotation and it made me think about how the scientists wanted to eliminate excessive feelings. Results replaced empathy. Overall I believe the chapter expressed the theme, scientific experiments are unpredictable in their extent of unethical data collection methods to get unethical results.
The idea of manipulation of a person's mind is really disturbing to me too. It's scary to think that in the future that could be possible and how nonchalant Albensti was about the whole thing.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you in the fact that in this story the scientists "wanted to eliminate excessive feelings", which struck me as really creepy and alarming, and the fact that in that world humanity could be reduced to scientific results with little to no feelings of themselves.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree Tosin. I found it odd that this was some how sanctioned. The whole setup seems illegal and if not, it is still very cruel punishment. The subjects were not well cared for and Abnesti really only cared about his results as he tested the same thing over and over.
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