For years I mistook the meaning of the Narcissus myth thinking it centered on love of self. Here, a much more dimensional and, to me, a vastly more interesting and accurate explanation is presented and reapplied to a more modern time. According to McLuhan, Narcissus’ plight arises not because he falls in love with himself, but because he is unable to recognize his image as belonging to him. “The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis or numbness. “The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended
The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” (115) here, it’s almost like you can feel all the lost he has felt because even though he is looking the mirror at himself, he can barley recognize it’s him that he sees. This
In Ken Kesye's " one flew over the cockoo's nest" we have different characters and different topics. Narcissism is a very important topic. Narcissist is a person who envies himself a lot and is selfish, who doesn't care about anything and anyone except from himself. We alse have Narcissistic personality disorder which is a sickness based upon someones overwhelming confidence and lack of empathy. Is our novel McMurphy is a character that appears very fascinated with himself throughout the book.
The exclusively human quality of narcissism programs us to believe that we are superior above all creatures, however, it is completely unwarranted as our transcendence exists only in our brain. We are no different than the savage beasts that lurk in the wild. Driven by raw instinct, our role in nature is the same as any other animal’s: fighting for the survival of our species. Even if it means murder.
As it says in Mythology by Edith Hamilton, "His (Narcissus) beauty was so great, all girls who saw him longed to be his but he would have none of them." (113) Every girl that saw him wanted him, but he did not
Eliezer, now fifteen-years-old looks at his reflection in a liberator’s mirror, the first mirror he had been given access to since he was twelve years old. Emotions overwhelm Eliezer as he sadly ponders, “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.” Eliezer saw a skeleton of the boy he once was. Three years of his life had gone by and in that time period, he had become unrecognizable to himself.
Furthermore, she is struggling mentally to keep serene; later learning that the person in the mirror is despondent. Forcing authoritarian rules to become one with society’s levels can make a being feel submerged and strained. To attain society’s
(Grafeman et al. 92). Those who have narcissistic tendencies tend to appear as though they are warm, charismatic, or even charming, as part of their initial relationships, but lack the empathy to sustain any type of relationship past a given point. For people with higher levels of narcissism, there is a strong desire to maintain a positive concept of self, and will often engage in ego-boosting activities to prove their worth. According to Grafeman et al. , it is “this constant pursuit of proving one’s competency to the self and others that is thought to frequently contribute to relational problems” (92).
The exclusively human quality of narcissism programs us to believe that we are superior above all creatures; however, it is completely unwarranted as our transcendence exists only in our brain. We are no different than the savage beasts that lurk in the wild. Driven by raw instinct, our role in nature is the same as any other animal’s: fighting for the survival of our species. Even if it means murder. Even if it means renouncing our humanity.
Qualities like manipulation and narcissism become more commonplace as people are not properly taught honesty and selflessness. This strain is shown clearly through literary works by many renowned authors, and how each of them views this phenomenon can be educationally beneficial. Works exemplifying these
Narcissus Forced to Face a Brutal Reality Was there ever a moment in your childhood when your dreams were shattered and you were forced to come to terms with a harsh reality of the world? In “Narcissus and Echo,” a section of Ovid's epic poem, Metamorphosis, Ovid details a particularly brutal coming-of-age narrative: that of Narcissus. Narcissus is a gorgeous-looking adolescent who attracts the love of men and women alike, but the love of all of his suitors is unrequited because Narcissus turns them all down. One day, as a thirsty and exhausted Narcissus drinks from a spring, he sees his reflection in the water and falls in love with it.
The main condition being Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is described as a patterned disorder of grandiosity, an excessive need for attention, lack of empathy, and entitlement. The psychodynamics of NPD is dysfunctional self-regulation, emotional regulation, and interpersonal NPD symptoms include believing oneself is the most important aspect, fantasizing about having control, greedy for attention, exploitative, envious, arrogant or having attitude, and feeling a sense of privilege. To relate to NPD, Sigmund Freud’s human psyche study provides reasoning behind the disorder and how it relates to Jack’s savage behavior. He states that the majority of individuals' mental processes are unconscious and fall into the hands of the superego, ego, and id. Id, the pleasure principle, ego, the governing agency, and superego, moral censoring agency, all contribute to individuals to make behavioral decisions. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory explains that these three components of the mind control human behavior.
The mirror metaphor conveys that for mankind to progress it must be aware of what it is doing as an individual and as a society. Without self-awareness at either of those levels, the civilization is
The narrator, though a young girl who seem to be inexperienced in the outside world is not that naïve and innocent as she is depicted. Her ideas showcase a potentiality for corruption and evilness within her. I saw him watching me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. I'd never seen, or else had never acknowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of it; and it was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror.
Gods like Hera and youths for example, Narcissus and others can be narcissistic. For example Hera thinks she is the most and only beautiful goddess out of all the other goddess. She was being narcissistic because she didn 't think about any other goddess except her. A youth that is narcissistic is Narcissus. He was too narcissistic because he thought he was too good for any women.
It is this conflict that ultimately drives Narcissus to his death. When Narcissus first sees his reflection in a pool of water, he is “overcome by the beauty of the image that he sees; he falls in love with an immaterial hope” (Ovid, 107). The image Narcissus sees is so beautiful that he is instantly captivated and hopelessly desires the man staring up at him from the water’s surface. The mysterious man appears so tangible and so lifelike that Narcissus is unable to recognize that the form before him is merely a reflection of his own appearance.