What happens if a person doesn't sleep for 17 days?
"There is a scholar, of course he will die!" Some people might say that.
Yes, this question sounds particularly absurd, but today I am going to tell the story of a housewife who has not slept for seventeen days, from Haruki Murakami's "Sleep".
Speaking of Haruki Murakami, we will think of his funny and heart-wrenching experience of running the Nobel Prize in Literature for many years.
His writing is beautiful and profound, and at the same time he has his own personality.
The book "Sleep" is very special, it has Kafka's absurdity and The horror of Ellen Poe, and we can also think of it as a fictional form of prose.
The heroine of the story is a full-time housewife in her 30s, who washes clothes and cooks at home every day, and her husband has his own dental office and has a stable income;
The child is well-behaved and cute, and the little life is comfortable and comfortable, but everything changes after the heroine has a strange dream!
She dreamed that an old man dressed in black was holding up a kettle and pouring water under her feet, but she could not move, feeling that her feet would rot if they continued like this.
What binds the heroine and what is rotting?
Perhaps because of this strange dream, which began to take root in the heroine's subconscious, she began to lose sleep.
No! To be precise, it is simply sleepless.
But what is strange is that the sleeplessness of the heroine has not brought her any impact, but it is exceptionally spiritual.
Originally, she was living around her husband and son every day, and her days were boring and trivial and fulfilling, but insomnia suddenly made her time a third more.
What is this one-third of the time devoted to?
At this point, the bookmaker should boast about the heroine, because what she chose to do was to read, to read Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
That night, the heroine's long-lost enthusiasm is ignited by "Anna Karenina".
She reads endlessly, some of her consciousness seems to be awakened, and she begins to enjoy the time, sneaking out wine and chocolates at night to taste them and face her own needs.
This woman who takes good care of her son and husband, because of reading, even forgets to cook, forgets the original conformist life.
In addition, she also began to swim in swimming clubs, driving late at night to go for a ride, enjoying her life expanded by insomnia.
But what makes the heroine feel a little lost is that no one around her has noticed her changes, insomnia all night, reading books day and night, and her thinking has begun to change dramatically, all of which no one knows.
Perhaps the heroine is deeply feeling haruki Murakami's words: "Life is basically lonely", even the closest people will not care about your smile.
Facing her sleeping husband, she recalled her husband's neutral attitude when she argued with her mother-in-law, which were trivial matters in life, but the face of the husband who had once fascinated her seemed to become ugly.
When she thought of her son, who might one day become a boring person like his father, she suddenly felt great disgust and fear.
During the day, the hostess would sit idly on the couch after washing and cooking, facing the empty room.
The son went to school, the husband will come back at noon to have a hurried and silent lunch, and if there is enough time, he will have a normal boring sex, but what about later?
Only during the insomnia at night did she seem to regain the focus and passion of her youth and do what she loved.
At the end of the story, the heroine's insomnia has lasted for seventeen days and nights, and late that night, she drives out for a ride, but in the gap between her stops and rests, two men shrouded in dark shadows begin to shake her car non-stop, trying to overturn it.
Her self-help line was thus broken, and the heroine could not ignite the engine anyway, and could only be bored in a small box alone, unable to go anywhere.
The story in the book ends here, and what exactly the two black shadows mean, perhaps the author is just left to the reader to think for himself.
Haruki Murakami's "Sleep" is a work that interrogates human subjectivity and revolves around the loss of "I" itself.
The heroine just lives around her husband and son every day, and the itinerary is familiar as clockwork, nothing new, and she loses the motivation to do what she likes.
The most frightening thing is that she no longer loves such a life, and she can't feel the passion from these trivial things.
Most people are like this, in order to avoid harm, they will slowly smooth out their edges and corners, integrate into the common template of society that is not interesting, and use their own hand-made cages to trap their souls.
Perhaps after reading this book, we should all think about the question of how we live in the face of the contradiction between ideal reality and respect our souls?