Space Between Ideas and Reality

¶ … space between ideas and reality is a common focus of a great deal of writing, whether explicitly or implicitly or intentionally or otherwise. This gap, in fact, can be considered the root of all conflict within narrative literature; it is the hero's growth from an idea -- or perhaps from the hardly-formed kernel of an idea -- to an idea that truly relates to and communicates with reality that forms the arc of any story. Huckleberry Finn must develop a true understanding of the society he lives in and address the gap between his idea of life as it should be lived and life as it can realistically be lived in his place and time. The characters in Arthur Miller's the Crucible are plagued with an idea of witchcraft that has entered their community, and all of the characters struggle to correct this idea and to occupy a space of reality that rejects these false notions. It is the journey through the space between the idea and the real that gives each story its drama and that forms the action of any piece of writing, fiction or non-fiction, and this can be seen in many large-scale as well as subtle ways in Jamaica Kincaid's "On Seeing England for the First Time" and Gretel Ehrlich's "About Men."

Authoritative figures and institutions, with ulterior motives, provide societies with certain images they want the public to believe and this eventually widens the space between reality and idea. Authorities tend to act like an invisible hand with the way they deal with images and ideas in society. Without the public realizing it, these images settle into their daily lives and become a false reality, with authority attempting to define and maintain the status quo.

In Jamaica Kincaid's "On Seeing England for the First Time" the invisible hand, the authority is education. In this case, education is the mode which the British government uses in order to guarantee control over its colony. By presenting the grand, illustrious idea of Britain, the British government is making sure that Antiguans are in awe and are not thinking about rebelling. The author expands on her experience with Britain while growing up in Antigua. Though she had never been to England at that point she remembers how they were forced to draw maps of England in school and how she was "familiar with the greatness of it." (Kincaid, 720) This points out how through education, children in Antigua were provided with the idea of great England, which later on made them feel incompetent because they were not from it. This idea of England was forced to its colonies by England in order to make the colonists, as the author puts it in "awe at its existence and small because I was not from it." (Kincaid, 721) it is Kincaid who provides the reader with the theory of the "space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart- idea of thing, reality of thing- the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness." (Kincaid, 724) the idea, in Kincaid's case is the greatness of Britain, whereas the reality is not anything like what she has been presented pictures, paintings, school or a storybook. When she went to England herself, she experienced their rudeness, discovered that the cliffs of Dover were not white but were "dirty and they were steep." (Kincaid,