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The Sacrificial Egg Short Story

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The short stories titled “The Sacrificial Egg” by Chinua Achebe and “The Elephant Vanishes” by Haruki Murakami deal with transitioning into a societal order succeeding the previous one by searching for the element that the new order deprives them of but the old order gives them. However, the characters faced with this conflict have contradictory responses. In “The Sacrificial Egg”, Julius Obi, a Western-educated Igbo, eventually comes to recognize the influence of “Kitikpa” (traditionally believed to cause smallpox) to Umuru, making him recognize his lack of acceptance of local tradition as he had grew up in a modern, post-colonialist lifestyle. In effect, the recognition of prevailing superstition humanizes Julius. However, in Murakami’s “The Elephant Vanishes”, the townspeople including the unnamed narrator are fear being enveloped in the new order of urban pragmatism and dehumanization as the town strived to care for the elephant even if the zoo closed down and …show more content…

Since the story is set in a suburb—near an urban area—it means that it exhibits an urban atmosphere, most evidently in terms of human relationships. Generally in urban areas, people live close together, but there is a slim chance that they know each other. This means that in urban areas, people lack intimate relationships. This applies to the townspeople, therefore they look up to the elephant and its caretaker, Noboru Watanabe, as their symbol for such. However, when they vanished, the people were so frantic for their disappearance that it reached the mayor and a search was called for but the search became futile as. The townspeople here are being subjected to a change in societal order as the elephant, representing the old order—the one involving intimacy and closeness—vanished, suddenly giving way to the new order that they [the townspeople] struggled against since the beginning of the

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