The Alienation in Liberation and Liberation in Alientation

The Alienation in Liberation and Liberation in Alienation

In spite of the fact that both Murakami’s “The Elephant Vanishes” and Aguinaldo’s “The Childhoods” convey each of their narrator’s struggle by unraveling the contradictions between their points of view against their pragmatic setting, both works induce to the theme of “alienation” and “liberation” through their own contexts as how the narrators will react to their respective crisis as each story progresses.

Consider the interesting movement of each narrator’s consciousness as revealed through their points of view in each story’s plot. Murakami’s narrator moves through the story by centering his narrations about the elephant and how other people perceives the event, then suddenly divulges everything when he states: “I met her near the end of September[,]” (Murakami 318) a statement that seems unconnected to the central crisis. However, the narrator fully reestablishes the connection of this diversion when “[he tells] her about the elephant” (321) He narrates his testimony that the elephant seems to shrink while being tended by its keeper.

In comparison to Murakami, Aguinaldo’s narrator actually starts the plot by deluding the readers into thinking that the whole story was about his college life. Bumping with his college blockmate, the narrator “remember[s] [his] block [and] . . . the first day of college” (Aguinaldo 3) up to his graduation from college; however, he completely divulges the readers into his true focus: finding his desired “three childhoods” as how the angel has prophesized, and has been his motivation in looking through bookstores to find “the 159th page of a bible” (5). But what’s interesting in Aguinaldo’s narrator is he is actually a Philosophy graduate (3).

With regards to the latter’s work, the narrator possibly, although incompletely, establishes his own credibility through his background information. Of course, the readers can emphasize the most unreliable event in the text is that when the narrator claims that “[o]ne night … an angel from the heaven . . . . [I]t spoke and [he] heard: ‘The key to [his] childhoods lay on page 159 of a bible” (5). But then, considering that he is a Philosophy graduate, such motivations and testimonies intend to become philosophical and sophisticated for ordinary readers.

Comparing with Aguinaldo’s narrator, Murakami’s narrator attempts to assert the truthfulness of his subsequent revelation by establishing his reliability and credibility as a “witness” of the absurd incident. He has proved his familiarity to the elephant by saying that “[it] mostly ate leftovers from the school lunches of children in the local elementary school”, breaking down the details of the city officials’ debate prior to the acquisition of the elephant, and his seemingly obvious obsession