A guide to the artificial self
ENG 400 Seminar Project
"The strange thing is, everything washed up from the sea was purified. Useless junk, but absolutely clean. There wasn't a dirty thing. The sea is special in that way. When I look back over my life so far, I see all that junk on the beach. It's how my life has always been. Gathering up the junk, sorting through it, and then casting it off somewhere else. All for no purpose, leaving it to wash away again."
Welcome to Etta and Veronica's final seminar project.
This website serves as a legend to go with the digital map portion of our project. Which can be found here.
The nameless narrator in Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is akin to other Murakami protagonists in character attributes, desires, and predilections. The narrator’s carefully craft their worlds with refined tastes, serving to secure a distinguished and comfortable sense of identity. However, when made to abandon the familiarity of their former lives by larger and uncontrollable forces, these symbols of self are revealed to be empty. Therefore, propelled as they are on fruitless and metaphysical journeys for self-actualization, their paths are often obfuscated by the material trappings of modernity. Submersed as they are within societal consumerism, they fail to see how the self they seek is a construct of culture. For our project, we wish to expose the extreme amount of work put forth by protagonists in Murakami novels to build a superficial impression of identity, with a particular focus on the narrator’s efforts in Hard-Boiled Wonderland.