Tag: books

It’s hard to believe Lost will be ending on Sunday. I’ve been blogging the books that have appeared on the show and their connections with Lost for four years so I figured I should post a final theory of what might happen when the show ends.

I predict people will throw their TV’s away. I mean, what will be the point of owning one after Sunday night? Sure Longhorns football will still be on, but you can catch the games at a bar.

As far as my predictions for the show, it all comes down to two books shown this season, Shusaku Endo’s Deep River and Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (follow the links for my posts on them), which form the basis of my half-baked, out-of-my-arse prediction, which is by no means a logical well-thought out theory. It’s just me brainstorming.  I’m probably wrong. I hope so. One of the best things about Lost is how consistently I’ve been surprised.

I still think the sideways reality is going to end, but I think it’s going to have to hurt. It’s a manifestation of anti-Jacob/Locke’s power triggered by the detonation of the jughead. It’s a big bang (see my post on Brief History of Time) that suggests echoes between Lost and Gnostic Christianity. I can’t help but think Desmond will emerge as a savior of sorts, the Christ who will show everyone in the sideways reality that it is an illusion (or a “black iron prison” as Philip K Dick put it in VALIS—see my post). This is how jack will know to kill Locke. Of course, for Jin and Sun and others it’s a pretty happy illusion. It probably will be for Sawyer when he meets Juliet (who I think will be making a final appearance) and they make a date for coffee.

This illusion will have to be destroyed to defeat Locke, and it will probably be done by Jack who will in effect be killing nearly everyone he knows to save the world in the crash reality. It’s a burden he’ll likely have to live with for the rest of a very long life. My guess is that Jack will do it when he operates on Locke. He will let him die on the table or kill him in a scene that will echo what he did to blackmail Ben in season 3. When Locke dies in the LAX reality, this will end it. This will also end any chance for happy endings for those characters whose lives are good in the LAX world. This is the sacrifice Jack will make, the sacrifice the island will demand to save the world, and to paraphrase Ben in season 5, dead will be dead.

Once the sideways reality is gone, Locke will be defeated, though I doubt he will be dead. Lost has always suggested a need for balance between opposing forces (see Deep River and VALIS again), thus Locke will not be killed. He and Jack will be stuck on the island, playing backgammon for all eternity while Locke cooks up another 1000 year loophole to kill Jack. Look for a sequel to Lost sometime around the year 3004.

So many of the Lost books suggest endless loops of cause and effect, death and rebirth, that I can’t help but feeling Lost will end circular in some way. It could end at the beginning or perhaps the LAX reality is actually happening after all of this, though I hope those aren’t the answers as either would feel like a cheat of sacrifices made by the characters. I suspect, we’ll see Jack as the island’s new protector largely escaping that cycle only to watch it all come back around.

And, I still say Ben’s a good guy, putting the long con on dark Locke.

Here’s the list all the Lost books I’ve read along with links to my posts about them. Here’s a link to the LA Times article in which I was interviewed. Here are links to EYE M SICK and Lost…and Gone Forever, true Lost blogs, and the best ones around. Not having them to read each week is almost as sad as Lost ending.

Sometimes details can hang up a whole story; for instance, in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, I could never quite get past the fact that the unnamed narrator, the underground man, was a retired civil servant looking back over his life from the vantage point of forty. I’ll turn forty this year and don’t feel the slightest bit old or ready for retirement, though such is one of the big differences between living in St. Petersburg, Russia in the mid-nineteenth century and living in the United States in the early twenty-first.

The underground man’s life goes something like this: I’m superior, more refined, more aware of lofty ideals and beauty than my contemporaries and peers. Because of this they are not worthy of my time and attention, yet I need these people I loath to accept me. I’m humiliated by my need for acceptance and so I attempt to show I am better than them by humiliating them, but I lack the courage to do even this and so I make myself feel better by hating them, yet I crave their acceptance all the more. It goes round and round leaving me trapped in my hole like a mouse underground.

But I kept thinking… you’re only forty, man, you’re still young, get over it. Still, there’s real psychological truth to Dostoyevsky’s portrait of the man, unable to change and therefore stuck in the circular thinking that his moral superiority over everyone in his life is the cause of his debasement which in turn causes that sense of superiority. It’s a kind of hell, really, and the circular nature of hell is a recurring motif on Lost, a concept first introduced to Lost with Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (back in Season 2):

Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.

And that is a perfect description of the underground man. Despite any amount of free will he may have, he’s trapped by his ego in a hell of his own making from which he’ll never escape. Of course that not escaping and instead choosing, against reason, a path that leads to destruction is exactly what the underground man is doing in order to prove his theory that human nature is to exercise free will even against the interests of oneself. In essence we can, and often do chose to destroy ourselves against all reason and opportunity to do otherwise.

So we make our own hells and dig our own graves. Isn’t that one of the themes of Lost, which constantly reinforces the notion that the characters’ exercise of free will has created the destinies from which they can’t seem to escape? Isn’t it the stubborn pride of Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Sayid and Ben that forces them to continue on paths they know to be unreasonable? Who on Lost can actually break out of his self-created destiny? Will that person be the candidate to replace Jacob?

In Lost, Notes from Underground appears in the Season 6 episode “Everybody Loves Hugo.” Hurley finds it among Ilana’s things after she accidently blows herself up. I didn’t see it pertaining to one individual character or storyline in that episode so much as it reminds me of the whole situation on Lost, in which each of the characters is trapped by his or her own weaknesses. It makes me wonder if anyone on this show is going to find a happy ending and some kind of redemption or if they will all, like the underground man, wither away in their holes, forgotten by an uncaring world.

Or maybe they’ll end up on the bottom of the ocean as hinted in the Season 6 opener wherein the island was shown on the bottom of the Pacific. Perhaps one or more of our characters is doomed to become an underwater man before this is all over.

Notes from Underground is the second Dostoyevsky novel to appear on Lost, the first being The Brothers Karamazov back in Season 2, and it’s a tough book to enjoy, though it is good. Whatever that means.

Be sure to check out the rest of my Lost book club posts.

One of my favorite episodes from Season 6 of Lost was “Dr. Linus,” which was the first one that made me care about what was happening in the mirror reality for its own sake. Any episode that centers on Benjamin Linus is going to be intriguing, and happily it included another novel for the Lost Book Club: The Chosen by Chaim Potok.

Right up front, I found the book an ironic prop in the show since its title seemed a direct affront to Ben, who despite years of service and loyalty to Jacob and the island doesn’t appear (at least as of this writing) to a “candidate” to replace Jacob. Despite his tireless efforts on Jacob’s behalf, Ben Linus is not the chosen, and it was in “Dr. Linus” that he had to finally come to terms with that fact.

The book itself is remarkably compelling. It’s a simple story, really, but it’s gripping in the depths of understanding and compassion Potok has for his characters. Potok’s story examines the friendship between two teenage boys from very different Jewish families in 1940’s Brooklyn. Danny Saunders is a brilliant young man from a Hasidic family. He has a photographic memory, and when he isn’t studying Talmud with his father, he immerses himself in “forbidden” knowledge: Darwin, Freud, Einstein. He forms an unlikely friendship with the novel’s narrator Reuven Malter, a modern Orthodox Jew who would like to become a Rabbi despite his father’s hopes that he will become a mathematics professor.

Driving much of the plot is Danny’s relationship with his father, the leader of their sect. Their relationship is one of silence. The only times they talk are when they debate issues of Jewish law. Danny wants nothing more than to speak with his father, but his father has made a decision to raise his son in silence so he will learn compassion to balance his intellect.

That silence should resonate with anyone who has been watching Lost. Ben’s greatest frustration with Jacob—and ultimately why he killed him—was the silence Ben got from Jacob. He never once communicated with him except through Richard, and when Locke appeared to be talking with Jacob in Season 3, Ben was thunderstruck and angry.

So why did Jacob treat Ben with silence? Was he attempting to teach Ben something… is Ben the chosen one after all? The silence led through Jacob’s death to Ben’s redemption. Perhaps that is what Jacob saw all along.

For more of my Lost theorizing and attempted analysis of the books that have appeared in the show check out the Lost Book Club index page.

Next up: Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Shusaku Endo’s Deep River appears in the Season 6 Episode of Lost, “Sundown.” Now that Lost is winding down, I can look at all the books that have appeared on the show and find myself amazed by how many great reads the show has given me since I decided to read all the books that have appeared. How much I’ve discovered. Deep River is another of the great ones.

Deep River is about a group of Japanese tourists on a pilgrimage of sorts to visit some of the Buddhist shrines in India, but most of the characters aren’t going because they’re Buddhist; they’re going to free themselves from their pasts and, like the Hindu pilgrims all around them, their paths lead them toward Vārānasī and the River Ganges.

There is Isobe whose wife has just died from cancer, but in her final moments told him she would be reborn; Numanda who wants to repay a debt owed to a bird whom he believes saved his life; Kiguchi, tormented by memories of his service in World War II; and Mitsuko, a loveless cynic who struggles to understand Ōtsu, the longtime target of her cruelty and derision who is also a troubled and heretical Catholic priest.

Life has not gone according to plan for any of these people, but in India, they are able to find not what they are looking for, but for most of them, perhaps, something deeper. Kind of like a group of flawed people who crash land on an island and find purpose and meaning in their lives.

As I read Deep River, I kept seeing parallels to Lost. Both works exist in a world between Christianity and Buddhism, and like Endo himself, who was a Christian but struggled to make that Christianity work in his Japanese mind, Lost has always hovered between these similar, yet divergent belief systems. In the end what moves Deep River is its recognition of a deeper spirituality that transcends the human construct of religion and points toward a pantheistic Christianity. As Ōtsu explains:

I can’t help but be struck by the clarity and the logic of the way Europeans think, but it seems to me as an Asian that there’s something they have lost sight of with their excessive clarity and their overabundance of logic, and I just can’t go along with it.

Sounds like Jack, Lost’s “man of reason.” Ever since Season 1, the Jack vs. Locke conflict has been built around Jack’s reason and Locke’s faith. For each man, his rigid ways have proved his undoing. Locke’s absolute faith led to his manipulation and death. Jack’s unyielding reason destroyed his life. The thing both men lacked was the balance between the rational and the mystical that Ōtsu seeks.

As for Lost, reading Deep River has convinced me that defeating the so-called evil anti-Jacob / Locke / smoke monster is not the point. As Ōtsu says:

God makes use not only of our good acts, but even of our sins in order to save us.

[…]

I was scolded for this notion at the novitiate; they told me it was dangerously Jansenistic or Manichaeistic (‘heretical,’ in short). I was told that good and evil are distinct and mutually incompatible.

Deep River asks us to consider the issue of good and evil from Ōtsu’s perspective, and I think it tells of an endgame. The “evil” being inhabiting Locke’s body is a manifestation of something greater, and its destruction is not going to be the endpoint of Lost. It will need to be balanced not defeated. The question, then, is who is going to spend eternity on the island as a counterweight to the anti-Jacob? I’m guessing it’s going to have to be Jack and wouldn’t be surprised if he and Locke spend all eternity on the island arguing the relative strengths of faith and reason.

The index of all of my Lost book club posts is here.

Next up: The Chosen by Chaim Potok

Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories is the book Desmond was reading on the plane in the Season 6 opener “LA X.” The scene occurred in the alternate reality timeline, and the book provides some insight into what is going on.

Haroun’s father Rashid Khalifa, The Shah of Blah, is a master storyteller, but when Rashid’s wife leaves him for another man, he loses his ability and desire to tell stories, especially after Haroun disparagingly asks, “What’s the use in stories that aren’t true.” One night, the water genie Iff comes to disconnect Rashid from the Source of the Stream of Stories by a P2C2E (Process Too Complicated To Explain) but before Iff succeeds, Haroun steals the genie’s disconnection tool and demands that his father be allowed to continue telling stories.

Haroun joins Iff on a journey to Katani, Earth’s hidden moon, where the Ocean of Stories (from which the streams flow) has been contaminated by the cult master Kattam-Shud who leads the silent Chupwalas and their shadow warriors against the good story-loving Guppees. Haroun, Rashid, Iff, Blabbermouth and Butt the Hoopoe must stop the cult master, rescue an annoying princess and purify the Streams of Story so that Rashid can have his gift back.

The book, which was a thoroughly enjoyable work of magical realism aimed at young readers (Rushdie wrote it for his son), provided some interesting insights into Season 6 of Lost, though it would have been more helpful to have read it sooner.

The main thing I keep thinking about is the idea of pollution in a stream of stories. The flash-sideways reality we’ve been seeing on Lost all season is a version of reality that isn’t quite what it should be, a situation similar to what Haroun finds in the various polluted stories he encounters. Ultimately, his adventures take him to the source of the Streams of Story from which all stories originate. If he can prevent Kattam-Shud from plugging this source, the stories will cleanse themselves and all will be right again.

This is a notion strikingly similar to the idea of the universe course-correcting, a notion Lost has been playing with since Desmond slipped out of time in Season 3. At this point, I’m thinking that the flash-sideways reality is a stream of story that will probably correct itself when Locke, Lost‘s own Kattam-Shud, cult master and lord of shadows is defeated. Perhaps the island is some kind of spacetime source for various realities and existences. Or something.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is at heart about the balancing of opposing forces—speech and silence, light and darkness—and how that balance is necessary to life. Lost has played with these ideas since its very first season and while Anti-Jacob/Locke has thrown the Island and possibly the world out of balance, it seems likely the rest of the series will focus not so much on destroying Locke but on balancing out his penchant for destruction in much the way that Jacob maintained the balance prior to his death at the end of Season 5.

The only other thing that leapt out at me was Haroun’s question to his father about the use in stories that aren’t true. That’s one that many of us viewers, confused by the role of the flash-sideways storytelling, have asked this season. It’s a fair question to which I think Brian at Lost…and Gone Forever has presented the best answer thus far in his excellent analysis of last week’s “Dr. Linus”:

Seeing Flash Sideways Ben choosing Alex’s well-being over gaining power for himself reminds us that he did the exact opposite the first time we saw him faced with the same situation. Seeing him making friends with Arzt and having a – well let’s call it “decent” – relationship with his father makes us realize just how alone he is on the Island right now… which made his breakdown scene with Ilana all the more powerful. He gave up everyone and everything for the Island – and look where it left him. Alone and lost in life (pun somewhat intended).

In short, the Flash Sideways actually served to make the On-Island storyline better, just like the original Season One Flashbacks did. By learning about our Survivors’ pasts, we understood their presents much better. Likewise, by seeing “what could have been” with Benjamin Linus this week, understand his present condition much better.

Which is, I think, the “use of stories that aren’t even true.” Perhaps that’s why “Dr. Linus” is my favorite episode (so far) of this season and one of my favorites from the series.

Next up: Deep River by Shusaku Endo.

Be sure to check out the rest of my Lost Book Club posts.