Monday, August 31, 2015
Sit Back and Watch the Fireworks
George Saunder's ¨Escape from Spiderhead¨ poses many ethical questions especially in the realm of scientific experimentation which is a huge issue currently as well as the philosophical question of free will. The prison that Jeff, Rachel and Heather live in essentially embodies the subject-object perspective that Freud poses. The one thing that I found quite interesting was the discussion of whether or not we are able to make decisions for ourselves or are we just manipulated in some way to accomplish an overall goal. Jeff ultimately takes the Darkenfloxx drug in order to stop the suffering he had endured through as well as to truly escape Spiderhead. However, a different perspective that could be considered is the idea that Abnesti actually manipulated the situation and got an answer to his overall question of whether or not a subject cared enough about the other to allow the Darkenfloxx to be administered because Jeff also had feelings of contempt for ¨the other man¨.
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This is a very interesting thought. I did wonder at the end of Escape from Spiderhead if Abnesti had used Jeff killing himself as data to conclude that he did care enough about the girl to kill himself before he watched her get the Darkenfloxx. I wish the ending hadn't been so sudden and there had been more explanation! Although it would probably take away some of the complexity from the story.
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