Character Analysis

    In my story The Complex Death I am the main character in a hell created by myself. The two main people that accompany me are Marilyn Monroe and Ernest Hemingway. However they are not "stuck" in hell with me as the characters in Sartre’s No Exit were stuck with each other. Instead they operate as both a torturer and as a source of guidance so I can come to terms with being in hell. But as a whole these characters are just figments of my imagination.

    I decided to include Ernest Hemingway because he is an intellectual writer that in the story is everything I wished I could be in life. So, being everything I wished I could have been, he was the most logical source of guidance. Marilyn Monroe is included here as well because I loathe snobbish movie stars, which is exactly what she is in this story. So, she becomes sort of a psychological torturer as well as a less direct source of guidance than Ernest Hemingway.

    The most interesting aspect of these characters being included in this story is that their likenesses are entirely fictional. Marilyn Monroe might not of actually been a snob in life, I just imagine her to be one. As a result she appears in my hellish dream state as a snob that I despise. In the same sense Ernest Hemingway might not have been such an intellectual. I just built him up in my mind to be an intellectual man that somebody might wish to model themselves after. This also leads me to conclude that these two character’s lives are irrelevant because in this story they stem from my imagination. One final note on these characters is that they only appear at times when Zach needs them the most.

    The "rules" of this hell reflect how I feel about the state in between life and death. I feel that when one dies he or she experiences a dream state that replays distorted memories like a normal dream. Only because there is no "waking up" your body is forced to sustain a never-ending dream state, unless we consciously end it. It is being debated among scholars that dreams last for only seconds but appear to last for an extensive amount of time. So, one might conclude that if dreams can appear to be lengthy, but only last seconds, can’t a dying human dream for an eternity?

    Rather than go through each scene in depth I will give an overview of each scene and what I am trying to say about either the story or real life.

    In the opening scene I tried to present a horrific situation that is a combination of Zach’s place of death and places he has visited in his past. The entrance of Allison is mainly because when Zach awakes he kind of has the sense that he is somewhere that is hell-like. So Allison coming in and abusing him is because he feels that if he were in hell that there must be somebody, or something to torture him. After being abused he bolts through the door and falls onto a heavenly green meadow with a lone apple tree. As Ernest points out at the end of the story, Zach is revisiting a pleasant memory from his past. The utopian green meadow with a lone apple tree is actually a famous painting Zach had once looked at before in life. This is also the case (to an extent) with the cornfields, the desert, and the gas station. These are images commonly present in horror films, which must be included in hell because hell is supposed to be horrific.

    Finally, Zach ends up in his place of death, the mill, after another severe beating by Allison. The reason he ends up here is because in this story it is a place for decision-making. Here Zach essentially made the decision to kill Ron and then himself. Then he ended up back at the mill to make the decision of life in a mental state, or death.

    In this story the main theme is questioning the common view of what happens when a human dies. The purpose was to incite debate over life and death. When writing this I felt that the most effective way to portray this image was not through play format, but through classic story telling format. I also could not have succeeded in doing this if I were to stop at five pages, so I thought it was key to double the length of the story. In conclusion I hope that I made you, the reader ponder the points brought up in my story.