Flauberts Parrot Call and Response

Life is eternally in balance. People are scales with life in one hand and imagination in the other- trying to figure out which is heavier without confusing one for the other. Life is heavier than imagination. It is like a dead weight pulling your hand to the ground, while imagination is like a helium balloon trying to pull you into the sky. Humanity does not like to be held down. Continually it searches for enough helium balloons to be lifted off the ground. Our minds do not like to be pinned down, and that is exactly what the reality of our existence does to us. We don’t like to think about what we have done, what we need to get done, and what has happened; instead, our minds want to drift into the fantasy of what will happen. This continual game of tag is “childish, even for adults. Especially for adults” (189). But we do it anyways. We want to pretend that we can fly, and we use books as our wings. Books are “a bit more cheerful, a bit more… life enhancing” than merely living (133). But the ball and chain of reality kicks in when we set the book down and “that happiness exists only in the imagination” (119). We prefer life through this skewed looking glass of imagination that makes everything seem more beautiful, and makes everything seem so much more related. Novels tie imagination and reality together so that we don’t feel stretched in the widening gap between the two. This idea is reinforced in the scene with the reflection in the train window. The man says that to look at him is “misleading”; to see him for only what reality can portray, somehow is not enough to capture the essence in him (96). “Study[ing his] reflection in the window” is much like reading books and chasing our imagination- “you know its presence is conditional” (96). But when the transparent reflection of the man has passed, we still know that it was there. This is why “directness also confuses” (102). When we look at “full face portrait staring back at you, [it] hypnotizes” you into imagining what its reflection would reveal (102). We cannot see a person without creating a persona, because we don’t see ourselves only as reality portrays us. Sometimes, we don’t want to face reality, and this is what has happened to Braithwaite and his wife. He is stuck hiding in a novel, for fear of his return to reality. He has removed himself of the reality that bounds him to the ground, and is floating on the balloons of Madame Bovary.