Narcissim: The Blind Ideal
...y and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.” Mangan’s sister is nothing but an object of the boy’s desire; an infatuation with a person to whom the boy has never spoken more than a few words, yet his actions would say otherwise. Blinded by Mangan’s sister’s beauty, the boy cannot see the superficiality in his actions. According to Diagnostics and Statistics Manual, Fourth Edition-Text Revision (2000), “Narcissists suffer from obsession with ideal, everlasting, or all-conquering love or passion.” The boy describes very similar symptoms like “My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself into my bosom.” These feelings and experiences are consequent of his lack of experience and since he is ignorant to the subject, his only option is self-reference which therefore leads to the exacerbation of his narcissistic tendencies. Throughout the story, the boy revisits the fact that he is stuck on face value. “I liked the last [book] best because its pages were yellow.” From this we can already see that Mangan’s sister is no longer a subject, but an object; Mangan’s sister has become a saint/someone in need of being saved. Mangan’s sister is always being referred to as a figure/object throughout the story. “I kept her brown figure always in my eye.” It shows he has no sense of what his emotions are telling him – he’s confused - and is fantasizing over a brown indefinite figure. After finally speaking to Mangan’s sister, the boy offers to bring a gift back for his “saint” from the bazaar to draw her closer to him. But all the while the boy is too blinded by his own ideal that he does not realize that he has fallen in love with an idealistic image and in doing so will ultimately lead to harsh realization that life and love differ from the dream. Upon leaving for the bazaar, the boy takes a train ride on a deserted train. “I took my seat in a third-class carriage of a deserted train.” This train ride "is a special train for the bazaar.” The train was completely empty, which means anyone who goes on a quest for the high and the holy must go al...