Category: Books

I love it when I catch a break in my effort to read and write about all the books on Lost. The latest break comes from last week’s “Catch-22.” Not only was the episode named for Joseph Heller’s brilliant antiwar novel, but one character – the mysterious parachutist – was even in possession of a copy, albeit the Portuguese translation, Ardil-22.

I read this book a few times in college and even devoted a large amount of time in grad school to studying the film. Naturally, I was pleased when Lost served up a book I already know and love.

Catch-22 is about the absurdities of life on a World War II airbase on the Italian island of Pianosa. The central character, Captain Yossarian, is a bombardier who wants out of the war because, well, millions of people are trying to kill him. Exacerbating his paranoia is the fact that each time his squadron completes the required number of missions, the number required is increased, creating a hopeless situation for the airmen.

Yossarian fakes illnesses and ultimately tries to get discharged on the basis of insanity, but in one of the novel’s many catch-22’s he is informed that trying to avoid flying combat missions is an act of pure sanity and therefore the harder he tries to prove he’s insane the more sane he appears.

There are a number of similarly circular and impossible situations that crop up throughout the book, each one deeply absurd and highlighting the ultimate absurdity of war and the immorality of those who profit from it.

It’s a great read and one that makes you laugh an uncomfortable sort of laughter. The kind of laughter born of pain and disgust.

On to Lost…

Like Lost, Catch-22 is a nonlinear narrative, often relying on flashbacks – particularly one in which Yossarian comforts a dying tail gunner – that are repeated, each time revealing new information. They’re also both about people stuck on an island.

The episode in which it occurs is a Desmond-centric episode in which Desmond gets one of his glimpses of a possible future. In his flashes, it seems that Charlie will die, but Desmond will be reunited with the love of his life, Penny Widmore, who may be coming to island to rescue him.

This situation presents Desmond with a terrible choice: Save Charlie and risk changing the course of the future in which case Penny won’t show up, or let Charlie die – essentially sacrificing a friend for his own happiness. Desmond ultimately decides to save Charlie and when they finally find the mysterious parachutist who should be Penny, it is instead some woman with a copy of Ardil-22 and a picture of Desmond and Penny.

The big unanswered question, of course is did Desmond change the future by saving Charlie? Can Desmond even affect the future? As Hurley says, his super power is kind of lame, especially if all it can do is leave Desmond stuck in the catch-22 wherein his only hope of being rescued is in sacrificing a friend.

At the end of Catch-22, Yossarian is busted for being AWOL, but he is given an opportunity to save himself and receive an honorable discharge if he will speak highly of and praise the policies of his crooked superiors. He ultimately refuses to sacrifice his fellow airmen just to save himself. Is this Desmond’s choice? Will he sacrifice the Oceanic 815 survivors to save himself or will he throw his lot in with theirs in an effort to save them all?

Last night’s episode, “DOC” (which stands for date of conception) contains its own catch-22’s (this time for Sun and possibly Juliet) along with one of Lost’s biggest wtf moments when the mysterious parachutist from the outside world informs Hurley that Oceanic 815 had been found and that everyone on board was killed. Holy living dead, Batman, that’s quite a bombshell. It kind of makes the whole show a sort of catch-22, as in, “hey we got off the island, but oh crap, we’re dead.” This leaves me thinking that the time warp theories are probably on the right track. Although it does also kind of point back toward the supposedly debunked purgatory theory, which is suggested by a large number of the Lost books from seasons 1 and 2.

I still say the island is a metaphorical purgatory, if not the real one (???).

For some interesting write-ups of “DOC,” check out:

• Dorkeriffic (great name for a blog, btw) where some interesting questions are posed
• Magic Lamp where Steve wonders if there is some kind of military op going on based on the parachutist’s gear
• Brian at BRIAN!!! Top Marks for Not Tryin’ has a good analysis with some interesting thoughts about some of the dialog
• The Atomic Blowtorch has some thoughts about Mikhail
• John at Critical Myth wonders if the the-crash-was-planned theory is back on the table

And, I’m still working on Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark from “Flashes Before Your Eyes.” Look for that post next week.

Click here for a list of my other Lost book posts.

Continuing my effort to read the books that appear on Lost, I’ve arrived at Stephen King’s Carrie, which makes its appearance in “A Tale of Two Cities,” the season three opener.

Prior to Carrie, the only Stephen King books I’d read were his more recent ones (except for Firestarter, which I read perhaps 100 times in eighth grade) so going back to his first novel was kind of fun.

Carrie White is the girl that gets picked on by all the mean popular girls. She has her first period at age seventeen in the shower after gym class. Her insanely religious mother never told her what this meant, and Carrie thinks she’s bleeding to death. The other girls make fun of her. Carrie is bitter, confused and angry. With the onset of her late puberty, she also develops telekinetic powers. One girl tries to make amends. Carrie goes to prom. There’s a practical joke and then Carrie turns her powers against her classmates.

My English classes just finished reading Lord of the Flies (my Lost post on that is here) and the question always comes up: what would happen if it were a bunch of girls? With Lord of the Flies in my head, I couldn’t help but think of Carrie as a kind of female version, with Carrie playing the part of poor doomed Piggy. With that thought in mind, it was hard not to think of Carrie as an examination of the effects of cliquish cruelty on the outsider, the kind of fiction that makes one think of things like Columbine.

Unlike much of King’s more recent work, Carrie is short and brisk. It’s a fast-paced novel that tells the story from a variety of viewpoints including investigatory committee hearings, police reports, letters, books written by survivors, scientific articles, and popular news pieces all interspersed with King’s no-frills narration. It’s one of those books where the form is part of the enjoyment of the text. A good read.

On to Lost. The first five minutes of season three was one of the most amazing sequences I’ve ever seen on TV. We meet Juliet hosting a book group meeting with no idea who she or any of the members are. She puts in a CD, burns some muffins and deals with book group members who complain about her book choice: Carrie. There’s a rumbling, they all run outside and there in the sky is Oceanic 815 breaking up above them. Suddenly, we realize that Juliet is one of the Others and that they live in nice houses with electricity and plumbing. They have the ability to score at least ten copies of recent editions of Carrie from the outside world. Your head spins.

Juliet says she chose Carrie because it’s her favorite book. What does this reveal about Juliet? Well, now that I’ve read Carrie and gotten to know Juliet a bit better its easy to see that Carrie White and Juliet the Other are both outsiders in their communities. Like Carrie, Juliet plots revenge (I wrote about this in my To Kill a Mockingbird post) against her own people. They are cruel to her (first sentencing her to death and then finally branding her in “Stranger in a Strange Land”) and don’t appear to think of her as one of them.

Like Carrie White, Juliet vacillates between being sweetly concerned with being liked and being an accomplished and merciless asskicker, though without Carrie’s telekinetic powers (I think). We saw this in last Wednesday’s episode (“Left Behind”) in which, Juliet cuffed herself to Kate so that she would have someone to be with after being abadoned by the Others. She appears to want to be with the Oceanic 815 survivors, but her manipulative nature and the fact that she wasn’t straight with Kate suggest to me that she may not be 100% on the side of the survivors. Perhaps, Like Carrie, Juliet is ultimately on her own side and all the while wishing desperately that she could fit in somewhere.

Next week’s episode features more Juliet flashbacks with Sayid, himself an accomplished and merciless asskicker, apparently offering to kill her if she doesn’t tell him everything. Can’t wait.

Other connections via Lostpedia:

• Carrie White, the eponymous heroine, attends Ewen High School. The principal of that school is named Henry Grayle (similar name to Henry Gale).
• In a Carrie TV Movie, the role of villainess Chris Hargensen was played by Emilie de Ravin, who currently portrays Claire.

This is also yet another Lost book that deals with mental/psychic/telekinetic powers.

Having nothing to do with Carrie, but interesting nonetheless, here are some links to three interesting posts about last week’s controversial Nikki & Paolo episode, “Expose” (which I really liked, by the way):

• Check the Fien Print wonders if “Expose” was Lost’s own version of Rosencrantz & Gildenstern Are Dead
• South Dakota Dark commends the episode for giving the viewers a break
• The House Next Door has some very good and amusing analysis as well. In fact, check back there every Thursday for good analysis (h/t to Scribes & Scoundrels for directing me there)

Click here to read all of my Lost book posts, or here for the index.

Next up… Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov.

When I set out to read the books that appear on ABC’s Lost, I started with the books that were either shown onscreen or directly referenced. I will make exceptions, however, for books I always inteded to read anyway and so it was with Robert Heinlein’s 1961 classic Stranger in a Strange Land.

I feel that I truly grok the fullness of Heinlein’s sci-fi tale about Michael Valentine Smith, a human who was raised on Mars by Martians and returned to Earth to grok the humans. Along the way Mike Smith (what a great name for a Martian) teaches humans about growing-closer through water sharing and he teaches them the importance of grokking.

Smith winds up starting a free-love cult that would have made many a hippy proud, and I can see why this book was so popular in the counterculture of the late ’60s, even lending the word grok to the hippy lexicon. Heinlein’s Smith teaches Martian ways to humans and takes the best thing humans have for creating happiness (sex, baby) and mixes them with the best of Martian culture (grokking, happiness, spiritual completion, mind reading, teleportation, immortality, cannibalism) making many an enemy among Earth’s politicians and megachurches along the way.

This is a book that requires a pretty serious suspension of disbelief, not just to swallow the Martian angle, but also the notion of humans being able to truly put aside all jealousy and selfishness in order to be happy. Most of the characters are thin and the book seems more than anything an outlet for Heinlein to ponder and argue with himself about social values, art, liberty, and religion. If you like a sort of wacky, semi-lighthearted philosophical novel with a sci-fi background, you’ll probably enjoy this. I did.

As to its status as a sci-fi classic, I suspect it makes so many of those kinds of lists not so much on its own merits as because of the way that it was picked up and embraced by the 1960s counterculture a few years after its publication. It’s one of those rare books where the author seems to have gotten ahead of the zeitgeist just enough to already be there waiting when the rest of the world caught up with him.

The connection to Lost comes in the title of the of the ninth episode of the third season, “Stranger in a Strange Land.” The episode is about Jack. The flashbacks find him in Phuket, Thailand, where he is, yes, a stranger in a strange land. On the island, Jack is still being held by the Others, but by the end of the episode, he seems to have joined them. We also learn that the tattoo Jack acquired in Phuket was gotten in violation of some mysterious taboos and says, “He walks among us, but he is not one of us.” In every way, we see Jack as stranger in strange lands.

We knew that though. The most interesting connection between Heinlein’s novel and Lost is in what it suggests about the Others. Minus the cannibalism and sex, the Others seem to have a quasi-religious cult based on attaining happiness, spiritual completion and possibly, teleportation, mind reading, projection and immortality. No wonder they seem so happy on the island.

Lost, as it it wont to do, turns the dynamic on its head, when the stranger in a strange land is not the man bringing the new and better way to live to humanity, but rather Jack, who seems to represent everything the Others are trying to escape in the real world. The question, then, becomes, will Jack drink the Kool-Aide? Based on the end of last week’s episode (“Par Avion”) it looks like he might have, making him no different from Heinlein’s Ben Caxton, the earthly cynic who joined Mike Smith’s Church of All Worlds and within forty-eight hours found a better way to live.

Of course, the title may have nothing to do with Heinlein’s book, Instead, it could be a reference to the Iron Maiden song, which is found on their Somewhere in Time album. That’s interesting enough when you consider that lately Lost has been playing up the question of whether or not the Oceanic 815 surviviors are lost somewhere in time. Some of the lyrics, which seem to tell of an Arctic explorer losing his way and dying, also bear a striking resemblance to certain issues of Lost:

Night and day I scan horizon sea and sky
My spirit wanders endlessly
Until the day will dawn and friends from home discover why
Hear me calling rescue me
Set me free, set me free
Lost in this place and leave no trace

Stranger in a strange land
Land of ice and snow
Trapped inside this prison
Lost and far from home

Strange how often a show about a tropical island has so many references to things Arctic, but there it is. The lyrics also speak of being gone for 100 years. I don’t know if we should start a Lost listening list, but the music and songs featured on the show are probably as meaningful as the books.

The last connection is biblical. “Stranger in a strange land” is a quote from that classic book about escape, Exodus 2:22: “And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.” Lost also references the Bible quite a bit, and this could be another instance of that.

So there it is: Stranger in a Strange Land, be it book, Bible or Iron Maiden tune, there are as many clues and suggestions as one cares to find.

For further reading:

• TheOrangeSlayedTheRake has a collection of interesting quotes about art and sex from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land
• Electronic Cerebrectomy’s TV Report: A Half-Season of Lost (check out the comments for some interesting theories about Watership Down)

For an index of all my Lost book posts, click here.

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men made its appearance on Lost in “Every Man for Himself,” the episode in which Sawyer gets conned and the Others demonstrate the truth of Jack’s season one admonition to “live together or die alone.”

Considering I’ve read it many times, taught it, and the fact that there really isn’t any mystery as to why it was included, it seems to be relatively low hanging fruit for a blog post, and yet, I’m only now getting around to it several months after its appearance. So here it is, the latest addition to my Lost book club.

Of Mice and Men is about two Depression era migrant farmhands. George is small and smart; Lennie is huge, strong, and intellectually a child. They exist in an every-man-for-himself world where no one watches out for anyone and everyone is lonely. George and Lennie are different, though, because “they got each other” and they have a dream to earn enough to buy a small place and live “offa the fat of the land.” This is something that neither can do alone, but Lennie’s strength earns them money, and George’s concern for Lennie protects him. Things go bad when Lennie accidentally kills the boss’s daughter-in-law, leaving George to shoot Lennie, at that point the only merciful option left to him.

It’s a quick and grim read, a meditation on loneliness and the practical impossibility of achieving the American dream in a society that refuses to protect the weak. It’s also one of those books that kids will read willingly since it’s short, the writing is easy, and there’s lots of profanity. Good stuff.

On to Lost. We first see Of Mice and Men in Sawyer’s flashback. He’s shown reading it in prison, a lonely every-man-for-himself kind of place if ever there was one. The prison story plays out in such a way that Sawyer gets an early release and a bunch of money, which he asks to have put in an account for his daughter whom he’s never met and may not even exist. In a way Sawyer is setting her up so that she can find her dream unlike George and Lennie.

It’s referenced on the island as well. Sawyer refers to Ben’s bunny killing and says that he might like Of Mice and Men since a puppy gets killed. Ben feigns ignorance of the novel until they reach the summit of the island where Ben shows Sawyer that he is being held on a different island, that there’s nowhere to go, and that he does need Kate. Ben then throws Of Mice and Men back in Sawyer’s face with this quote:

A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. It don’t make any difference who the guy is, so long as he’s with you. I tell ya, I tell ya, a guy gets too lonely, and he gets sick.

Sawyer doesn’t recognize the quote and Ben explains it to him, thus revealing that he has a better understanding of both literature and human nature than Sawyer, which is of course how he is able to so effectively con Sawyer throughout the episode.

Of Mice and Men doesn’t provide any clues to the great mysteries of Lost, but it serves as a nice literary allusion in an episode that revisits one of Lost’s central issues, namely the live together or die alone calculation.

Click here for the rest of my Lost book reviews