Final thoughts on narratives

I arrived in Chico on August 22, 2007 eager to meet my roommates. I would be living in the University Village college dorms for a year. I had no clue who my roommates were. I unloaded all my stuff into my room and decided it was time to introduce myself. Only two of my three roommates had moved in so I conjured up some courage and knocked on their door. My first roommate I met was named Sue and from China. The second roommate I met was named Megumi and from Japan. As awful as it sounds I was utterly disappointed. They hardly understood English and all the fun cliché things I had thought of when it came to college roommates were slowly fading away. However at the time I didn’t realize how much I would learn from them. Both of them were here on their own with no friends or family, in a sense they had left their frames and identity behind in their home country forced to live a frameless life. Their identity was no longer the same as the one they and left behind. Their new identity was what country they were from. Well in the beginning that’s how I saw them but now I know that there is so much more to them than my previous thoughts.

In the novel “An Artist of the Floating World” by Kazuo Ishiguro the main character Masuji Ono is floating between two worlds. He is caught in between old and new world Japan.  In old world Japan he is highly regarded by his pupils but as the war begins he begins to paint propaganda art. His reputation begins to decline after the war because Japan didn’t end the war well.  All the while that Ono was painting propaganda art he always felt that he was doing the right thing. As the war ended and time went by he slowly realized “that at the time [he] acted in good faith. [He] believed in all sincerity [he] was achieving good for [his] fellow countrymen. But, as you see, [he is] not now afraid to admit [he] was mistaken” (Ishiguro p. 123).  Burton states that “… it is only when we learn how to stand outside ourselves, literally seeing ourselves as a character in a novel, that we come to realize the extent to which our choices are compromised both by values consciously or unconsciously adopted by ourselves and by the communities to which we belong” (p.131). I think that is what Ono had to do. He stood outside himself to realize that he had made a mistake. He realized that he was wrong and was able to stand outside himself and see that he had made a mistake.

To be a member of the floating world, a responsible member of the floating world, is to acclimate oneself to a new environment. In the novel “A Question of Power” by Bessie Head the main character is constantly floating through her environment. She would constantly move from place to place. It didn’t matter to Bessie because she said “I have no single known relative on earth … I have always been just me, with no frame of reference to anything beyond myself” (p.64). She lives a frameless life with no one to count on and no one to call her family. As a reader I feel that this is the number one reason as to why she became mentally ill.

I feel that without frames one can be lost in this world. I believe that “frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. As a result they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act”. We all need some sense of frames. Some structure in our lives to give us direction. In the same sense we need to be open and not be confined by the frames that we have in our lives.

As the semester comes to an end and I begin to pack my things to go home for the summer I see now how my two roommates have changed my aspect on life. They both came to this country with nothing, a frameless life. They are floating between two countries, their home country and America. Through it all they remained open to learning as much as they could here. They weren’t weighed down by their frameless life instead they evolved to their new surroundings and made frames here. I will most definitely take this with me, especially because this summer I will be spending two months in Ireland. I will take what I have learned from them and keep an open mind in hopes of creating my framed life when I go to Ireland.