The Sheridan Baker Thesis Machine and Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter - Admission/Application Essay Example

e alone and to live another kind of life away from family, on the one hand, and his responsibilities towards his deformed child and family, Bird, the main character, takes us deep into himself to try to see what that must mean for a man. It is not so much coming to a resolution of the conflict as much as going for a ride inside a mans subjective reality and trying to understand what it must be like to be in his shoes, conflicted in this manner (Oe; Perales; The Writing Center; Fay; Nobel Foundation; Kreisler).

This is an exploration of an inner conflict in a man torn between family and a deformed child, on the one hand, and his notions of personal freedom and being free to do what he wants, unfettered by such obligations. Mostly he fantasizes about that other free life, while to his mind burdened by the terrible implications of having to raise a child with profound disabilities. There is a lot to say about Oes A Personal Matter with regard to the subject of the son and the deformity or disability that sparked the tumult in the life of the father, on which the entire novel seems to revolve.

The crisis is gripping on a personal level, something that provides a perspective into the inner lives of those who have had to deal with children born into the world with severe handicaps, in societies that basically ostracize not only the children but also the parents and most everyone around whom the handicapped children grow. It is also revealing with regard to how Japanese culture, for instance, causes such great trauma and crisis in the parents of children with deformities. Going a level down, the level of the personal, the novel gives us a glimpse of the subjective reality of a man who fathered such a child.

This man, in a way, stripped of his nationality and of his societal affiliation, viewed not as a Japanese living in such a time in Japanese society, but a man of subjective thoughts and realities, this man represents in essence each and every one of us. It is from