Faro Vitale

Professor Brady

Eng 102

5/4/12

                                                Stuck in a Fantasy

            In todays post modernistic age it is common that people live most of their days in a fantasy world separated from reality. In the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gillman and the short story “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri show this fantasy world. Both stories show the concept of living in ones own fantasy world. Living in a fantasy is a major theme in the movie/novel “Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk that’s about the main character being a schizophrenic who has multiple personalities to cope with his life. The main character (narrator) creates her fantasy world around her obsession with the yellow wallpaper surrounding the room. Mr and Mrs. Das and Mr. Kapasi all live there own fantasies and dilutions from being unhappy with their lives, and the narrator fights his multiple personalities from breaking out into the real world. Mental fantasies are a reoccurring theme within all of these characters to get away from their unfit realities.

            In Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” the main character (narrator) builds a fantasy world around her obsession with the yellow wallpaper.  She speaks on this “pattern” that she sees in the wallpaper that she determined to figure out by constantly staring at the wall and grows very uneasy if anyone should look at the wallpaper besides her. Even though she suffers from minor nervous issues she should have enough sanity to avoid giving into the false reality there is something within the wallpaper in the room. She seems to believe a few things with the pattern, she mentions a woman constantly creeping in the wallpaper and she says the pattern moves in the nighttime. She later finds out or so it seems in her mind that the woman is shaking the pattern in the wall “The front pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!” (Perkins Gilman 325). As she lives in the room that is in fact driving her crazy and making her fantasy world even worse because she is seeing all of these things within the wallpaper that aren’t actually there in actuality.

            In the short story “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumper Lahiri there are a few characters that are caught in a fantasy separated from reality, but none more then Mr. Kapasi and Mrs. Das. Mrs. Das lives in the fantasy in that she sees Mr. Kapasi as a father figure and someone to tell the secret that’s she’s been keeping from everyone for the past eight years. She does this because she and her husband seem to have a very unhappy relationship and Mr. Das himself is not stuck in a fantasy but is completely oblivious to the things going on around him because he is so caught up in his book and his surroundings. Throughout the entire story Mr. Kapasi is the biggest victim of living in a fantasy world, growing completely obsessed with Mrs. Das the moment she describes his job as “romantic”. Kapasi grows very intrigued in furthering his “relationship” with Mrs. Das when she asks for his address so she can send copies of the picture they have taken, he creates this fantasy that they will talk on further topics and get to know each other better, “she would write to him, asking about his days interpreting at the doctors office, and he would respond eloquently, choosing only the most entertaining anecdotes, that would make her laugh at loud as she read in her house in New Jersey” (Lahiri 55). He loves the fact that she shows so much interest in his job mainly because he is unhappy with the way that his life/marriage as turned out. After finding out Mrs. Das’s secret Kapasi’s fantasy of there relationship together is slightly faded and eventually ruined when the paper with the address on it blows away in the wind.

            Living in a fantasy world is clearly exemplified in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel/ movie “Fight Club”. In the story the main character (narrator) suffers from major schizophrenia and is completely separated from reality. He makes up another personality that he thinks is another person, he creates this fantasy man to deal with the things in his life that he perceives as unfit. He sees this other personality as if he were a real person having conversations and performing actions with this alter ego. A prime example of his fantasy is the scene when the narrator and Tyler are fighting each other outside the bar but then we later find out that there is no Tyler and the narrator has been fighting himself the entire time. The narrator overcomes his fantasy by eliminating Tyler by shooting himself therefor killing his alter ego.

            In todays post modernistic era people everyday make up there own little fantasies to cope with everyday life. In the short story “The yellow Wallpaper” “Interpreter of Maladies” and the novel “Fight Club” they all show prime examples of people living in fantasy worlds in order not to deal with the problems that they have in there life’s.