Sunday, October 6, 2013

Dense but Foreboding

Utopia was a tough read in just how utterly dense that it was. With all of the footnotes splattering the bottoms of every page, I felt like I was reading a huge elaborate inside joke that would take a long, long while for me to totally understand.

But once I started to get into it, I saw that it really is easy to see just how much Utopia can apply to even our modern world today, especially when it comes to Raphael's teachings on punishment and government. Maybe that says something about our general ineptitude as a species to keep the masses in line, or maybe it just says how impossible that such a task really is in reality and execution.

That's why I'm immensely curious about what this 'Utopia' island is actually like that Raphael can't stop saying enough nice things about. Is it really as much of a paradise as he claims it to be? Or is there some kind of dark and cruel underlying factor that'll make the island altogether undesirable to any approaching outsider?

I'm being cynical again when it comes to these kinds of stories and books, but I'll just say that a far-fetched land like Utopia has to have a dark undertone to it, or at least that very one 'thing' that'll make the narrator (More himself) turn his head and question the island's validity.

2 comments:

  1. I wholly agree with everything you said. The footnotes made me want to rip the bottom of every page off. But, as you said, it is easy to see a coorelation between a lot of what Raphael says and today's society. I'm really interested in what Utopia is actually like, and I think I disliked Book I so much because it didn't really touch on it that much. I also agree that there has to be a fault in Utopia itself somewhere. Nothing is perfect.

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  2. It's interesting that you guessed it right! Utopia does, in my opinion, have some seriously dark undertones in it. Slaves is an obvious one but also this idea that once again men are at the top of the totem pole

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