I kind of had a hard time not taking this as an ironic, veiled self-satire narrative by the author using a first-person perspective to deliver between-the-lines the critique of the character they’ve portrayed in the first-person. It hit me at some point that it -could- be, depending on how clever the author was or not. I don’t try to be sharp or ironic as I find it distasteful most of the time, although when I ran into the concept of benevolent irony it gave me moral food for thought, irony has largely just looked like another clever way to wound people, and especially by projecting superior ability against the inferior. In this case it makes for effective satire, however, just because the cleverness (if I’m not misperceiving the author’s intent) is quite brilliant.
That being said, if I were to try and interpret this writing as ironically satirizing the character’s perspective by the author, the identifying tokens would be: to find strength in disconnecting one’s self from enculturation via tropes that allow one to own one’s mistakes so as to make half-hearted fixes after-the-fact which did not require hindsight to avoid causing, maintaining a covert ego in relation to them, and especially over-fixating on the influence of tropes to the point of dehumanization. Am I getting that right? The problem isn’t that the end of the world is stressful, it’s that people’s experience of the end of the world which is annoying. And it’s such an annoying behaviour that the author has learned to transcend by recognizing that, while they may have an Oppenheimer-sized effect upon the end of the world, they at least don’t have his pesky and annoyingly selfish guilt about it.
A ton more observations feed into this interpretation. If I’m misreading the ironic self-satire of the character by the author, writing a first-person narrative towards that effect, and if instead it’s a sincere expression, let me know. I’d proceed just to provide a critical response to the writing without fixating on my perception of the author writing such a clever narrative. And apologize for the assumption.
And then, frankly, I might go on to write that story if it isn’t the case!
I kind of had a hard time not taking this as an ironic, veiled self-satire narrative by the author using a first-person perspective to deliver between-the-lines the critique of the character they’ve portrayed in the first-person. It hit me at some point that it -could- be, depending on how clever the author was or not. I don’t try to be sharp or ironic as I find it distasteful most of the time, although when I ran into the concept of benevolent irony it gave me moral food for thought, irony has largely just looked like another clever way to wound people, and especially by projecting superior ability against the inferior. In this case it makes for effective satire, however, just because the cleverness (if I’m not misperceiving the author’s intent) is quite brilliant.
That being said, if I were to try and interpret this writing as ironically satirizing the character’s perspective by the author, the identifying tokens would be: to find strength in disconnecting one’s self from enculturation via tropes that allow one to own one’s mistakes so as to make half-hearted fixes after-the-fact which did not require hindsight to avoid causing, maintaining a covert ego in relation to them, and especially over-fixating on the influence of tropes to the point of dehumanization. Am I getting that right? The problem isn’t that the end of the world is stressful, it’s that people’s experience of the end of the world which is annoying. And it’s such an annoying behaviour that the author has learned to transcend by recognizing that, while they may have an Oppenheimer-sized effect upon the end of the world, they at least don’t have his pesky and annoyingly selfish guilt about it.
A ton more observations feed into this interpretation. If I’m misreading the ironic self-satire of the character by the author, writing a first-person narrative towards that effect, and if instead it’s a sincere expression, let me know. I’d proceed just to provide a critical response to the writing without fixating on my perception of the author writing such a clever narrative. And apologize for the assumption.
And then, frankly, I might go on to write that story if it isn’t the case!
This essay is unironic.