Brent W Cline

This article focuses on the relationship of four Mexican characters in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and their rhetorical use of the Mexican Revolution in conversation with John Grady. Rather than these characters being shaped by the revolution, analysis of their historical embellishments, omissions, and fabrications show them to instead imagine the revolution as a history that validates their individual perspectives. In so doing, they reflect John Grady’s desire to imagine a mythical cowboy past that can be lived in Mexico. These similarities therefore suggest that John Grady’s cowboy fantasies arise from a universal human desire rather than the flaws of an individual person, age, or country. By John Grady’s ultimate removal from Mexico and confession to the Texas judge, he may in fact be the only character in the novel who attempts to resist the universal impulse to turn history into self-justification.

If Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can arguably be considered the first science fiction (SF) novel, then it is fair to say that SF has been interested in the practical and philosophical consequences of posthumanism since its inception. SF narratives have long explored the anxieties and promise of the posthuman, what Neil Badmington calls “an activation of the trace of the inhuman within the human” (171). For instance, in two influential texts in posthuman SF, Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker and Greg Bear’s Blood Music, the next step in human evolution demands the divorce of consciousness from the physical body, so that the “inhuman” can help transcend the person into a higher plane of existence. In Star Maker, the nameless narrator becomes a disembodied person, able to span galaxies and unite with alien minds, which grant him expanded consciousness. In Blood Music, the entirety of humankind unites to an enormous organism that dispenses with the physical body but allows “participants” to retain their intellectual and emotional identities. The promise that such visions of posthumanism express toward the relationship of the inhuman and the human body is applauded by many critics within feminism and queer theory, perhaps most famously in Donna Haraway’s essay on the cyborg. The interaction between the inhuman and the body destabilizes the ability to enforce normalcy, so that “ambiguity and difference are redefined to become signifiers of an inclusive posthuman embodiment” (Wolmark 76).

Key words: mental disability, Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, pity, narrative theoryOf American novels that engage with the topic of mental disability, few are more popular than Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon. Such popularity seems based on a simplistic reading of the novel where the mentally disabled are objects of good-natured compassion. A more thorough reading of how Charlie Gordon is presented, however, leads to the conclusion that mental disability is the embodiment of death in the novel. Readers are first taught to pity the pre-operative Charlie, but once they come to respond to the ethical voice of the post-operative Charlie, his regression to his original state becomes the rhetorical villain in the novel. At first an object of pity, the mentally disabled Charlie Gordon eventually becomes the metaphorical horror of oblivion that no character has the power to overcome.