Final Thoughts On The Floating World

If you could sit down right now and write a narrative about yourself, what would you write? Would you write that you were a great person who always helped everyone out? If you did write this would it be the truth? We go through this “floating” life so quickly, yet we are able to impact so many people in so many different ways. With all the hope and despair that influences our life and those around us one has to ask themselves…How does one choose to be a responsible citizen of this floating world?

“Firstly, to be a citizen of the floating world is to recognize and acknowledge the narratives that constitute our identity; furthermore, it is understood that these narratives are constantly in the process of being reshaped and rewritten” Burton 131.  Our lives are always changing, sometimes for the better and other times for the worse. However our lives change, we need to accept what is going on around us and know ourselves before we try to influence others. In the novel An Artist of the Floating world one of the themes is that this life is “neither easy nor painless” Burton 131. The author, Kazuo Ishiguro explores many hardships that Masuji Ono, the main character, faces throughout his life. We are taught to be aware of the many things around us that are changing. For a lot of us there are also temptations that we need to avoid. Ishiguro sends his message across when he says “Artists…live in squalor and poverty. They inhabit a world which gives them every temptation to become weak-willed and depraved” Ishiguro 46. We may not all live in poverty but there are many temptations which, if we grasp onto them, will lead our lives into greed and cruelty.

“Secondly, to be a citizen of the floating world is to make ethical choices when framing our understanding of the world, to be aware that while a frame can afford an important structuring device for understanding the world, it can also prove to be severely limiting and restrictive” Burton 131.  I feel that there is a delicate balance between living a frameless life and living a life that it so “boxed in” that you don’t have the freedom to be your own self. Bessie Head teaches us, through her book A Question of Power, that living a frameless life can be deadly. Elizabeth, the main character, lived such a frameless life that it drove her away from everyone and eventually drove her mad. “The man’s instinctive sympathy and offer of help was the nearest any human being had approached her isolation” Head 58. I think we need to be aware of other’s suffering and offer help. Many of the people who are in these types of positions just need a helping hand to get them back on their feet. I feel that if we are able to help others in this life we are ultimately helping ourselves become stronger human beings.

“Thirdly, to be a citizen of the floating world is to be attentive to the subaltern voices that circulate widely in a media-saturated world” Burton 131. In our Multicultural Literature class we touched on this aspect quite a lot with the novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee. Throughout the story Jasmine has multiple selves. Changing her name to suite who she is running from and who she wants to become. Her husband Taylor is the one person she trusts with everything. “I told him everything: the marriage, the bombing, the murder. I had been until the time an innocent child he’d picked me out of the gutter, discovered, and made whole, then fallen in love with” Mukherjee 189. All of her husbands before Taylor could only see and accept one side of her. They would see only the mainstream American she had become, or the subaltern Indian she still carried with her. We need to be able to accept everyone for who they are and give them a voice. We here many things in our media and think that it is the only thing going on. The music, the news and the movies are not all the surround us. There is an entire world out there that needs our help and we need to give it to them.

So once again ask yourself, what would your narrative compose of? Are you going to be that great person who helped those who needed it? I for one am trying my hardest to make those around me feel like they are as important as everyone around them. I have found myself and figured out who I really am. The key to helping others is figuring out who you are first, then you can truly be a responsible citizen of the floating world.