Fan x Descartes

One thing that has really stood out to me (and most of us, I imagine) is the passive nature of Fan's character - as we've remarked many times in class, she seems to progress throughout the narrative simply by virtue of existing, her magnetic personality and demeanor magically drawing others to her aid. In addition, the few actions she do perform seem subdued and perfectly efficient, with none of the spray-n-pray or trial and error that we might expect from the protagonist of a 'dystopian', 'post-apocalyptic' novel. This was mentioned in class, but never more fully explored, but cumulatively, these characteristics make Fan seem mechanical - some kind of high-functioning machine devoid of consciousness but otherwise totally human. Let's dub this character 'Fan the Automaton'.

Another thing that we noticed about Fan is that she seems to almost act as a lens or mirror for both other characters and the narrative itself - her one dimensional personality acts similarly to the still surface of a lake - at once reflective and perfectly transparent. This has two primary effects - first, Fan the Automaton acts as a lens through which readers can understand the society and circumstances of the novel at large. Through her somewhat stagnant personality and lack of dynamic action, Fan essentially reflects everything that goes on around her. Her tale is not one in which she acts, but one in which everything acts around her. She becomes an untouchable, unchanging object around which her world is revealed. The second large effect of Fan the Automaton is that it individualizes the experience of the reader. In the same way that the 'Tale of Fan' is made to be simple and idealistic so as to broaden the narrative to encompass as many as possible, Fan as a character becomes a 'mirror' in which we, as individual readers, can find parts of ourselves in. The same emotionless ease with which Fan navigates the many obstacles she face allows the reader to fill in thoughts and feelings where there are none mentioned according to the individuals understanding of circumstances - the 'Tale of Fan' is at once universal and highly individual. 

The whole Descartes piece fits into this because his philosophy gives some serious meat to this analysis of Fan the Automaton. Descartes essentially stipulated about the human mind that individual consciousness is the only objective truth - it's somewhere along the lines of 'I think, therefore I am'. A fundamental part of Descartes philosophy is that perception is false (or at least, can be)- all of the information that we receive from our senses are simply our own minds lying to us: other humans may  not even be humans, as the only 'consciousness' that we can be sure to be true is our own. What if they were simply machines which walked and talked and acted perfectly like humans, but lacked the little voices in our heads that essentially are the only things defining our existence? He called these beings 'Automatons', and they were not individual beings, but instead manifestations of our own consciousness and existence. There are striking similarities between the automatons of Descartes philosophy and our own beloved Fan - read back on the arguments entailed above to see if their significance has deepened with this new understanding of Fan's classification as an automaton. 

Phew! It felt like I was writing an essay - this post was not an easy one to craft and even at this point I'm not entirely sure it makes sense. tl;dr: there's some seriously freaky stuff going on. 

*1/28/16* Edit:
Someone in class just asked - "how do we even know that the story even happened?" - it's a good question, and it plays into the whole Descartes aspect of the ideas listed above: it's unimportant that we cannot confirm the legitimacy of certain parts of the novel or even the narrative itself, because the significance of 'the Tale of Fan' lies in the individual perception of the reader. The power of storytelling is manifested in a meta-narrative in which the story about a story contains an entirely unwritten chapter which we as readers write for ourselves.