Blogging about blogging - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Navel Gazes

I have been blogging for two years.  I started on a whim.  The reluctant wife and I had watched a DVD and I thought I had something to say about it, and so wrote a brief essay about that and explored how to put the essay up as a blog.  I was curious about whether this would be something that I would stick with and whether it would be something that people had an interest in.  Two years later, this will be my sixty fourth blog - so I have written, on average, more than three blogs a month.  But my production has not been that steady.  I tend to write more in the summer - last summer, when involved in two retreats, I was writing a blog a day.  More often than not I am writing about every two weeks - generally a book or a movie will contain something that seems worth writing about - something that I think I have something to say about - at about that rate.

Blogging has provided an outlet for something that has been bottled up in me - the analyst would say inhibited - for a very long time.  My own analysis (all analysts have to undergo their own analysis - something that I knew about for a long time and I have wondered whether I maneuvered myself into this profession to justify getting my own analysis without appearing as self-indulgent as analysis appeared to me) was a difficult undertaking.  I was terrified on a daily basis of what I would talk about.  I became quite a student of my dreams - both because they were interesting in ways I had never imagined - but also because they created a text for me to take into the analysis.  I would have something to talk about and, I think this is important, something that would be of interest to my analyst.

I think that I have always questioned the value of what I have to offer to others.  I am sometimes quite wide of the mark in my understanding of a text - I went to a college where we engaged in discussions of multiple texts - and I was far from the most astute reader.  More fundamentally though, I think that I have wanted to make sense of things from a very early age.  I know, this doesn't distinguish me.  We all want to be up on what's new, to not be out of step, to not be blindsided.  And I have this anxiety and belongingness wish in spades.  But I think there is also a wish to have a conceptual and, particularly apt for the blogging aspect, a narrative understanding - a cogent story or script that holds things together and that makes them make sense.  Blogging offers an opportunity to do just that.  And I can offer it without imposing it -people can make use of it if they will.  But I can offer it - for though I have questioned the value of what I have to offer - I also believe that I do have something to offer.  One of the things that became clear in my own analysis was the wish - almost a truism of the psychotherapeutic professions - to make others happy.  I think what prepared me to be an analyst, and a professor, is the wish to do that by making sense of things (including the experience of people I cared about).

It also, and here I beg the indulgence of my readers, offers the opportunity to get the ideas out there without having to get them into perfect shape.  I don't have to submit them to a magazine or a journal and have an editor think about whether what I have to offer is useful - and to pore over my work and do multiple rewrites as it slogs towards publication.  I generally read through the blogs three or four times, making changes each time, before posting.  Sometimes a blog requires major revisions and I start it over from scratch, but this is rare.  It generally feels, as I am writing them, that I do have a narrative thread that makes sense.  I am not always able to fully exploit that.  I often become frustrated in arriving at a conclusion that would pull multiple threads together.  And on rereading a few months later, I am sometimes not able to see the threads as clearly as when I was originally working - and am able to see redundancies in language and poor grammar that eluded me the first time through.

That said, I am generally reasonably pleased with the product.  One of my mentors complained that I "clearly cannot write, and my concern is that may indicate an inability to think."  My writing has improved as the result of lots of close attention from multiple editors over the years, including him, though I could have done without the attack.  It is still far from compelling - indeed it can be clunky - but I believe that it serves to get some messages across.

What do I wish to get across and why?  I am a reluctant psychoanalyst because I wish there were a model of the mind that was simpler, that was more user friendly, and one that wasn't so difficult to become conversant with.  I want to convey some of the beauty - some of the power - of the analytic perspective to make sense of the world without becoming too preachy.  I would like to invite others to consider how the analytic perspective can inform - can open up new and worthy perspectives on the human condition.  I would like to clarify why, reluctant as I am, I continue to work from this perspective - caught in it and by it despite its complexities, its internal inconsistencies and its intermittent opaqueness.  Because sometimes it does illuminate things clearly.

I think I am also a reluctant psychoanalyst because of the public persona of psychoanalysis.  I think there has been a huge emphasis on psychoanalytic content - what we "know" about the deeper, unconscious aspects of the mind.  Terms like anal retentive - which is based on a theory about early development that does not carry much, if any, weight with contemporary psychoanalysts, is so firmly entrenched in our culture that I doubt it will disappear, in part because it does resonate with some "deeper" truth - the relationship between our fascination with our own messes - with our feces - and our wish to keep things neat and orderly - as a way of simultaneously denying and engaging in contact with chaos.  But these are exactly the kinds of statements that I found off-putting when made by psychoanalysts.  While I indulge in them (as I just did), I think part of what I want to do is to emphasize the process of analysis - the discovery that is part and parcel of every analytic engagement and that is filled with unpredictability - with a sense of the unknown - rather than with "knowing" what is "really" going on inside the other.  It is this sense of the openness of psychoanalysis that I would like to share with others, even if I fail to do that regularly.

I also want to record my experience.  To leave a legacy of my lived experience.  What I have been reading, viewing and experiencing, and how I have thought and felt about it.  Whether there is a God, it is truly remarkable that this complex, beautiful universe has been able to create sentient beings who can appreciate and divine that complexity.  And, not surprisingly, those critters are themselves complex and intriguing.  And for some reason I believe that my perspective on that is worthy of my putting it out there - of having an audience for it.  And that, in turn, is part of what makes blogging attractive - someone may come across this and read it.  And that is exciting.

To date, more than 2,000 hits have been recorded on the blog.  Most are from the US; Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia also figure heavily.  But people from India, China, and places like Venezuela also have searched for things on the internet and come across the blog. (Note: less than two years later (4/1/16 , more than 30,000 pageviews have been recorded, though the distribution is about the same; by 8/20/18 there are 130,000 views).

People rarely reply to the blog.  I do have friends and family who read it and may comment on this posting or that.  Sometimes I will bring a post to the attention of someone and they will respond directly to me about their experience of reading it, but there is a weird sense that lots of people have had some exposure to what I have written and not responded - sort of what an author must feel who writes a book that is bought - perhaps reviewed (or blogged about, I guess) and sits on shelves in people's homes and in libraries being read by - whom?  Freud was astounded, on his one trip to the United States, to discover that the cabin boy was reading his dream book.  That was when he concretely realized just how widespread his ideas had become.

In my own analysis, it was sometimes frustrating to not know what my analyst was thinking.  Sometimes I did know, and sometimes he and I were very much on the same page.  He might say something that I was in the process of forming - or was just about to say or even, and this is more speculative - to think.  At other times he was wide of the mark.  He misunderstood me  - in a variety of ways.  He might have misheard something - or his ideas may have taken him in a direction that seemed tangential.  He was also, at times, way ahead of me and I could not yet make sense of what he was saying.  I don't think I ever got a complete sense of his ambivalence about me.  About the ways that he appreciated me - but also the sense of the limits that he recognized in me and the feelings that he had about that.  Part of what makes an analysis different from being parented is just that - not to know the wishes and dreams that our analyst has for us - and the ways in which we have disappointed our analyst by not achieving his or her dreams.  It is hard enough to know ourselves from within - and the point of an analysis is not really to know, objectively, what another thinks about us - but it sure does make me curious to know what a person that I have spent all that time telling my thoughts - someone who is thoughtful himself - thinks about what I have had to say.  That said, a couple of times he said complementary things, and I quickly minimized them.

When I started blogging, I was curious about whether I would continue to have new things to say about the things that I observed - or whether I would become a drudge - saying the same thing about lots of different subjects.  I think that the psychoanalytic perspective - the psychoanalytic tent - is broad enough that I continue to be surprised by all that it contains, and I hope that I am able to bring some of those many perspectives to bear on topics in ways that are fresh - that the reader can find different analytic ideas in the different blogs across time.  I hope that I have not bored my reader, just as I hope that I did not bore my analyst.  I hope that, while both blogging and analysis are self indulgent, that they have also proven to be, in some palpable measure, productive.  That the investment of time and money in understanding the human condition - and more particularly one person's condition - generalizes in ways that are useful to others.

I expect that some people are searching for this blog because they have essays to write of their own, perhaps as school assignments, and they are looking for what others have written about what they must write on.  Certainly I frequently check Wikipedia and other reviews - especially to keep the narrative of a movie straight in my head - as well as the names of characters, something that is very difficult for me to track.  But I hope that it is the psychoanalytic perspective that is attracting hits.  That people really are interested in what a psychoanalyst would have to say about this or that.  That there is still curiosity about this perspective and that, like Freud's cabin boy, people from all over are still interested in how the unconscious is constructed and what looking from that perspective might do to our understanding of the world that we live in.  And I hope that this blog does not disappoint.  That despite its lack of polish - and despite its sometimes wandering narrative - that it can illuminate a text, a movie, or an aspect of our experience in ways that seem novel and yet vibrant - unexpected and yet somehow true.  That this thing called analysis, despite our ambivalence about it, is useful to us.

Postscript:  It is now two years later and a lot more hits have occurred - The blog is approaching 20,000 hits.  I am in the process of going back through the posts and editing out some of the more egregious scanning problems and making the posts more cogent.  I am also adding links and pictures to them, where relevant.  All of this is part of an effort to create a narrative index - and later a more bare bones index or two - to the site.  I guess, in the context of this post, I am trying to organize the mess.  One thing that is apparent to me now in a way that was not then is that my writing style is more psychoanalytic than I knew.  It is free associative.  A movie or a book or an experience interests me and I think a bit about it, have a general outline for how I will articulate my experience, but mostly write what comes to mind and see how that resolves.  Tom Ogden's Creative Readings has helped me realize that this is what is happening as he has written about how to read psychoanalytic writing (someday I will blog about this book, for now I have included a link to another's review of it).

Postpostscript:  It is now four years later (2018) and I have blogged again about blogging, though this time it is more about issues of numbers and net neutrality - and the question of whether adding ads - something that will detract from the experience of being on the blog imo - will increase traffic.


To access the narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

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Andre Agassi's Open - The reluctant Psychoanalyst Ponders The Ability to Communicate

Know Thyself.  Easier said than done.  And Andre Agassi is incredibly open about how little he has known himself across the course of his life.  There's an irony here, because he seems to know about everything that is going on around him and to remember it with incredible clarity.  There is another irony in that he was an iconic figure in our culture - one whom we, in my generation, know - one with whom we feel familiar - whether from his play, from his packaging, first with Nike and then with Canon, or from his star studded relationships, first with Brooke Shields and later with Steffi (or, as she prefers, Stephanie) Graf.  How can someone who is so well known not be known to himself?  And, as he gains self knowledge, how far has he come?  These are questions that we ask with our analysands all the time.  They are also questions that we should know will contain a great deal of uncertainty in their answers.  Some of the uncertainty will come from not knowing how much of the memoir is Agassi's, it is a collaborative effort with a Pulitzer Prize winning writer - but mostly it will come because we are not collaboratively engaged, ourselves, with this person, despite his implicit promise to be open. That said, the form of the writing appears to be somewhat psychoanalytic in that the first step in the writing was for Agassi and his co-author to engage in long taped conversations about his life and to transcribe them.  They then worked and reworked them to become the book, but it still retains the feeling of narrative - of a tale told to a confidante.  We are able to listen in - even if we can't engage, analytically, in the dialogue.

Before delving into analysis, let me first say that the narrator of this story is an incredibly likable guy.  He tells his story well and I would find it entertaining even if I had no idea who Brooke Shields was and hadn't seen him playing tennis on TV for over a decade.  This guy comes across as someone who would be fun to hang out with.  In part this is because he doesn't "know" himself.  He's not filled with the kind of self-love that is off-putting.  The voice of this memoir is very similar to the voice of Bill Clinton in his memoir "My Life".  There is an aw-shucks quality of "Can you believe that this happened to me?"  And I think for Andre, more than for Bill, though it is a bit the case for both of them, it comes from a place of being the golden child - not through effort - though both displayed a lot of effort (almost against his will Agassi hit a million - such a big number - a million tennis balls a year for almost thirty years), but through disowned effort.  The central revelation in this book, something that Agassi "lied" about in interviews throughout his career, is that he hates tennis.  The activity that most defines him - the one that has brought him fortune and fame - the thing that he is most "known" for - we now "know" is something that he does not identify with.  It is something that he does - as it were - against his will.

So it is interesting that this man does not mention his second major packaging slogan - Rebel, though the first, "Image is Everything" is disowned as a Madison Avenue ploy.  But rebel he does - but also, I believe, does not.

Agassi is born to a highly demanding immigrant from Iran - a youthful boxer and apparently the lone tennis player in Tehran (he hit balls against a wall?) who escaped to build a better life in the United States.  Here he met and wooed a woman - a Clevelander - who was taken by his charm - they eloped to California and ultimately landed in Las Vegas where he worked as a pit boss - and she learned how much grit she had as she withstood his harsh diatribes and crazy pursuit of having one of his children become the next number one tennis player in the world.  The father bought a place far enough out in the desert that he could afford it and have enough land that he could build a tennis court on it, which he did, even though he knew nothing about construction.  Then he built a crazy dragon of a ball delivery machine to fire balls at his four children who wielded rackets to fend them off.  His youngest, Andre, was particularly adept - particularly quick, and he was being shown off by his father and hauled to tournaments all over the west at a very young age.

Andre went along with this - mostly, he maintains, because he got caught up in winning, which he liked and, at least as importantly, because he imagined his father liked it, and because he hated to lose.  When Andre meets Brooke, she comments that they are so much alike (and like her friend Michael Jackson, whom Andre finds a bit bizarre) because they had no childhood.  Brooke had a mother who pushed her into modeling and acting from a very early age - but more importantly, from a psychoanalytic perspective, used her as a tool to achieve her own goals.  This use of another as a narcissistic extension, or in plain English, an extension of oneself, is an important component of all parenting.  Who hasn't cringed when their child makes a mistake in public - as if it were we who were making the mistake?  Who hasn't cheered when their child has done well - and felt as proud, or even prouder, than if we, ourselves, had done that thing?  And what child hasn't work hard to achieve the adulation of his or her parent?  And what child hasn't experienced, to a lesser extent than Andre, who was sent away from his parents' love to a tennis "academy" that felt more like a prison, the irony of winning their parents attention only to be disappointed by being in the limelight, or having greater demands put on them, or achieving some other unintended consequence?

And who hasn't been a fan of Agassi, or Graf, or Sampras because we see something in their character - something in their grit or stamina or ability that we admire and identify with - or want to identify with - that we want to own, and that we borrow by becoming their fan - their big brother or sister, or mother or father - so that they have, instead of just their nuclear family on the sidelines, a big family - a stadium full of appreciative fans using them as narcissistic extensions - as self extensions.  And is it any wonder that, in the midst of being so many things to so many people they lose a sense of who it is that they are to themselves?  Especially given that even the most grounded amongst us - those blessed with parents who are frequently able to see us for who we are and might be - and less frequently for who they fear or hope we are and might be - who amongst us with this "healthier" foundation knows themselves?

So Andre has presented this book as a chronicle of who he has been - unbeknownst to himself - but also who it is that he has become - how it is that he has become better known to himself.  And he has made great progress in this.  His first marriage, even though Brooke reflected aspects of himself to himself, was an empty one - at least as it is related here.  Though my hunch is that is was not as empty as he portrays it (more on this in a moment).  He and Brooke began their love match by courting via fax machine when she was shooting a movie on location in Africa.  They found solace in each other - a similar perspective on the world, but they were also very different people.  He - intensely private and competitive, she very public and affable - if somewhat - well vacuous would be cruel, and naive would disavow considerable worldliness, but perhaps shallow in the sense of seeking whatever it is that she is looking for in this interaction at this moment, and being satisfied by it (and not, like Andre, bearing a grudge against an opponent who cheated when they were young teenagers and feeling vindicated when he destroys him in a professional tournament, but also not like Andre with clear likes and dislikes - with a comfortable sense of what he wants to eat in this restaurant, and no particular interest in trying new things on the menu).  She characterizes her openness to new experience as a virtue, and derides his stubbornness as a failing.  And this book is presented, in part, as Andre's overcoming this failing - becoming a new person, a more open person.

The resolution of Andre's character, and his evolution as a person, he pins to his becoming generative.  He tips the valet parking guy more than his nemesis, Sampras, does.  And he, the kid who drops out of school at 14 (his Mom took the correspondence courses for him), starts an academy - there is some irony in this word as it was the place he was sent off to - for urban kids in Las Vegas.  He has been transformed from anti-school to pro-school.  At least for others... What we don't hear about are his own scholarly pursuits.

I am not nitpicking here.  I don't think or expect that Andre should go from being the best on the court to getting a MacArthur genius grant.  But what I mean to suggest is that there is a bit of hollowness to the coming of age portion of this memoir.  Mr. Agassi has matured.  He has decided to start a family with Stephanie.  He is less open about his relationship with Stephanie than he was about the relationship with Brooke.  Partly that makes sense - she is s a private person and they have an ongoing relationship that deserves to be protected.  But it also seems to me that this relationship may be more about supporting Andre - he may be more like his father than he can recognize - perhaps especially because, on the surface, he has changed directions so completely - neither he nor Stephanie want their children to become tennis players.  He is not involved in the development of his children as extensions of himself.  And he is proud of that.  Are they serving the same purpose by NOT being pushed into a career in tennis?  This seems to be a trap - he is damned either way.  And my sense is not that it is through his children -about whom we learn very little - that we will discover the transformation - or lack thereof, but elsewhere.

Agassi has always been competitive.  What drove him, from his perspective, was not his love of tennis, but his love of winning.  I think that, underneath that, what may have made his character so compelling - and may have helped him engage so deeply in his tennis career - was actually his ambivalence.  This is a man who deeply loves - and hates - his family of origin.  He craves closeness with his parents - and does come to see and respect them in ways that are admirable - he appears to achieve a three dimensional picture of them and to get a sense of what drove them to do the things that he hated - no mean feat.  He built a world of friends - the press described it as an entourage - who supported him, and to whom he was deeply attached and whom he supported financially, but more importantly emotionally and spiritually, when they were confronted by terrible life situations.  He is both deeply invested in himself and in the people near him about whom he deeply cares.

What he does not acknowledge in the book is that his openness is partial.  He says that he hates tennis - when in fact, I believe that he also loves it.  He portrays his relationship with Brooke as vapid and states that when it was finally over, it was over.  And yet she is listed as one of the people who reads the manuscript before it is published.  In one of their early breakups, Andre smashes his trophies - and then tells Brooke about having done that.  I think he is trying to articulate a deeply felt desire to be married to her not as they have been - but as they could be, though he cannot imagine how they would get from here to there.  He hates her as she is - he hates the relationship as it is - and yet he has derived great satisfaction from it and from her - from the idea of her and from the idea that she is present in his life - a fan of his - even if that has been convoluted.

This is an enthralling tale of the development of an enfant terrible.  The kid who, before our eyes morphed from one persona to the next, perhaps most incredibly into mature tennis star who became dedicated to the sport he hated as his career peaked and ended.  This book gives us access to the internal experience that accompanied the roller coaster ups and downs that saw him get to that point.  And it is, as the title promises, an open rendition of that experience - surprisingly and charmingly so.  It also, and here I would say of necessity, comes up short of some types of openness, because I think they are just out of reach of the author.  We can, and here I have, opined about what may lay beyond that reach - but we won't know until he goes there.  This book, which on the one hand seems so complete - it is presented as the definitive take on his life - almost cries out (in my mind) for a sequel.  After he steps out of the limelight; after he writes his memoir; after he settles down with the woman who seems right for him and raises his children, who does this man become?  Can he continue to develop the amazing capacity for openness that he has shown here?  As he becomes everyman, will he continue to be able to articulate that experience?  Will this man of the many personae (and hairstyles) continue to develop?  For his, and his wife's, and his kids' sakes, we can hope so.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

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Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads A Pulitzer Prize Winner about North Korea

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction “has been awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.”  Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son is a glorious coming of age novel about a fictional child in North Korea who climbs from obscurity to the pinnacle of power – something that would, in fact, be quite far-fetched – so far-fetched, the narrative maintains, that it takes people by surprise, and the audacity of the character and his life makes what he accomplishes possible.  So this rags to riches tale is American in form, but, I think, more deeply related to American life, and the reason to award this prize, which has gone to such books as To Kill A Mockingbird and American Pastoral, has to do with what I believe the judges took to be the essentially American perspective of the book, one that I will try to address from a psychoanalytic perspective.

The narrative in this book is organized into two sections: “The Biography of Jun Do,” and “The Confessions of Commander Ga.”  In fact, the characters who are highlighted in each section are one and the same person.  Jun Do is the orphan master’s son, a boy whose mother has died, who grows up in an orphanage with his parental relationship to the orphan master obscured so that he is not perceived to be privileged compared to the others in the orphanage, kids who take on the lowest and most dangerous work and that frequently leads to their death or maiming, with only the slim hope that they will be adopted – though this turns out to be a false hope as the adoptions are frequently by state agencies who use the orphans as slaves in various dangerous industries, and orphans can never marry and have children because they don't have a family to represent them, so being saved by this kind of adoption. not to a real family that would support their becoming capable of having a family of their own, is an empty fantasy.

Jun Do's name is an orphan name - meaning he is named for one of the 118 heroes of the war of American aggression.  His particular hero's quality is one of loyalty.  And, while the name highlights a virtue - indeed Jun Do's virtue - it is also a brand, one that makes him immediately recognizable as an orphan.  When the orphanage falls apart and he loses his father, Jun Do goes into the military to be trained in an adaptation of Taekwondo: he learns special techniques to fight in the dark so that he can defend the tunnels that pass under the DMZ into South Korea.  He then becomes a translator of English so that he can listen to military communication from a fishing boat and report on what he hears.  On the boat, when it is boarded by the US Navy, he becomes a North Korean National hero – through subterfuge.  The boarders see the shabby shape the boat is in – it has no fire extinguisher and no life boat.  Both are absent because they are expensive, but the life boat is also not there to prevent defection.  So, of course, when the fishing boat goes out on its next trip equipped with a life boat, one of the sailors steals the life boat and sets out to defect.

The rest of the crew would be held responsible when they get back to port, so they concoct a story where the defector was thrown overboard to the sharks by the US Navy who they state reboarded them.  They add that Jun Do jumped into the water to save the crew member, and, to make the story plausible, the fishermen catch sharks and inflict shark wounds (which they then sew up with fishing line) to Jun Do.  After Jun Do tells his tale, he is conscripted into a group that goes to America to argue that the US is routinely engaged in acts of piracy - his is an example - in order that Kim Jong Il can recover a remote sensor of radioactivity the US intercepted on its way to North Korea.  The argument being something like - you routinely steal from us and board our sovereign vessels, so you need to return this thing we own that you have unlawfully taken.

Jun Do is chosen to be the ambassador's truth teller not because the content of his story holds water - this is the Korean means to evaluating the truth of a narrative- but because of the certainty with which he tells the tale - which is what the American's listen for when they hear a story.  What we have access to is the reason this is the case.  Jun Do draws on very real experiences to inform the affect that he brings to a narrative.  The particular facts of the narrative are a fiction, but the emotional tenor of the narrative is true - to the marrow of his bones.  From this perspective, the Orphan Master's Son mirrors The Life of Pi.  The irony of this junket is that everything about it is a sham - and there is more than a little humor in the ways that the Koreans interpret Texan's honest attempts at hospitality (they go to a Senator's home in Texas) as one long series of insults - and are frustrated that their own insults are deflected or received with grace - something that feels, on some level, humiliating to them.

After his return (which did not eventuate in the return of the stolen goods), Jun Do is thrown into a prison - for unclear reasons - apparently this more or less just happens to people - where he mines for uranium.  Commander Ga is the minister of all the prisons in North Korea.  He achieved this standard by winning an international Taekwondo competition bringing great honor to his country.  He was rewarded by becoming a cabinet minister, and was given the most beautiful woman in Korea, the actress Sun Moon, as a bride.  She had been a consort of some sort of Kim Il Jung's.  Kim Il Jong had written all of her movies for her and she was clearly his truly beloved.

Commander Ga, it turns out, is a bully who routinely beats and then sodomizes other men, and then takes a photograph of them after he has disgraced them.  He has also disgraced Kim Jong Il and they are currently experiencing a Cold War.  When Commander Ga visits the prison, he decides to pick on Jun Do in the mines.  Jun Do kicks out the light and soundly defeats him in the dark - likely killing him.  Then Jun Do does the unthinkable - he assumes Commander Ga's persona and convinces first the head of the mine and then Ga's driver that he is Ga.  He returns to Ga's home and then to his office and functions as if he were Ga.  This is understandably confusing to people like Sun Moon - who assumes that this is some sort of test by her husband, whom she assumes to be still alive and cruelly engaged with her.  Jun Do/Ga's salvation is that he publicly apologizes to Kim Il Jung, who publicly accepts the apology and thus cements him into place as being the person he has pretended to be.

So why is this such an American tale?  This spring President Clinton gave a graduation speech at Howard University where he stressed that the privilege the graduates of Howard University (and every other University in the US) enjoy is the opportunity to choose their vocation.  Most people, historically and currently, are forced by economic necessity into work that will feed themselves and their families by whatever means presents itself.  It is only here (and in other developed nations) that many of us are able to follow - sometimes discover and follow - our passions.  (Btw, Bill Clinton included additional good advice - do what you are good at and you will be more likely to be happy).

Jun Do determines what the other orphans will do.  As the orphan master's son, he assigns them to various tasks, including those that will maim and kill them.  He is able to keep himself relatively safe, but must bear the burden of responsibility for other people's fates.  His own fate is determined by outside forces until the transformative moment when he assumes command of Ga.  From this moment forward, he enjoys a certain kind of freedom - but, this being North Korea - it is a limited kind of Freedom.  He falls in love with Sun Moon and her children, and he is aware that they are going to be condemned if they stay in this country.  And we are able to see that as a new character is introduced - a "progressive" member of the interrogation unit of the secret police, he cannot have an open relationship with his parents.  We come to realize, along with Jun Do and the police officer, that old people in North Korea do not, as the propaganda maintains, retire to the coast to frolic in the surf.  Old people die - they are forcibly removed from power, if they have that, and tortured.  If not, they are randomly imprisoned, or sent to the country to pick rice at harvest time, wearing city clothes, and they may or may not find their way back.  This Orwellian world they live in would be unbearable if they could feel the full force of it (and would be unbearable to us as readers if we were exposed in a raw way to it), so things occur passively, not actively.  Events happen.  And we are simply witness to what is happening, including in our own lives.

Jun Do, then, bucks this system.  He does not simply witness his life, but instead inhabits it.  He chooses to assume an identity, and he chooses to exercise his will.  But he cannot escape his fate.  He ends up with the same fate as the hero he is named after - he sacrifices himself because of his feelings of loyalty.

Why is this distinctly American?  On the surface, it is not.  This is not our happy ending of being able to assume a new identity - something that is part of our mythology - but we are not able, in this tale to escape our fate.  So, I think from this perspective, this might be a cautionary tale, as so many other Pulitzer Prize winners have been.  We should be looking for what it is that we become enslaved to in the US; what might we do to help our families escape this slavery?  What news will they send back from the new, better world?  What will that world look like?  The portrait of the US in this book - of Texas, of two women rowing around the world (OK, I left out a lot of subplots - this is a big rich book with lots of good stuff to sink your teeth into), of spies and compassion, is the most admired but also feared country in the world.  It, ultimately, is not a place that Jun Do longs to go to.  He is North Korean.  This is his home.  And, as isolated as it is (and, by extension, as isolated as we are in the US - this is a very strange mirror that is being held up for us to see ourselves in), it is our place.  And what we are doing to others is largely outside of our awareness.  How can we become aware, as Jun Do does?  Do we need the training in pain control that he has received in order to tolerate accurately perceiving the world and our place in it?  I think this text assumes that it will take great strength to be able to directly confront reality - a psychoanalytic truth if there ever was one.  And, even when we do that, we are not going to be able to escape our fate.  We are not, in important - essential - ways free.  We are bound by circumstance, time and fate, and by our own mortality, to a particular place and to a particular end - one that we may not recognize until we arrive at it.  

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