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Kapasi sees Mrs. Das as a lonely housewife who could be a perfect companion to him in his own loneliness. He misses or ignores cues that she may not be interested in him for his own sake because, at some level, he wants her to be this companion. He sees many details about her, such as her bare legs and Americanized shirt and bag, but he passes over others, such as the way she dismisses her children's desires and her selfishness with her snack. Such unflattering details do not fit with his conception of her. Likewise, Mrs. Das wants Mr. Kapasi to become a confidante to her and solve her personal and marital difficulties. She views him as a father figure and helper and misses or ignores indications that he may not fit those roles. Mr. Kapasi is "flattered" (55) when Mrs. Das views his job with such interest. She is "unlike his wife" (55) in that she reminds him of "intellectual challenges" (55) and it does not take long for him to begin a romantic adventure in his mind about her. He wonders if the two are mismatched because he recognizes the sings of a bad married from his own experience. These include the "bickering, the indifference, the protracted silences" (55). He even becomes intoxicated as he remembers Mrs. Das saying the word romantic. He checks his appearance in the rearview...
As he gives his/her address, he imagines their correspondence and their relationship growing, giving him hope that "all was right with the world" (56). He is consumed with this image because he wants it to be real. At the end of the story, Mr. Kapasi is awakened to the reality of what he contrives in his mind. In short nothing is at it seems and it takes the image of his address floating away on a breeze to understand how insignificant he is to Mrs. Das. He watches the Das family in the final scene, knowing this image of a disjointed family would be the one he remembers.
Truth affects us in many ways. We like to believe truth will set us free, as the old adage states, but the truth of that sentiment is that truth is more complicated than that. Part of the reason truth becomes problematic for us is the fact that we are human and emotional creatures. Truth is almost elusive as we try to find a way to make circumstances "true." In the end, the people and the truth we think we know become strangers or, even worse, sources of pain. These stories reveal how truth does not set one free as much as it ravages the soul.
Works Cited
Lahiri, Jhumpa. "A Temporary Matter."
-. "Interpreter of…
Works Cited
Lahiri, Jhumpa. "A Temporary Matter."
-. "Interpreter of Maladies."
Annie Leibovitz's images of celebrities in costume or a photographer who dresses him or herself up as a different persona in a clearly ironic fashion (such as a woman who might dressed in drag to show the culturally constructed nature of gender) may be examples of more emotionally and intellectually truthful forms of photography than candid snapshots that falsely show a happy family. Even a journalist taking photographs of a
Truth in Fiction "Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." -- Kurt Vonnegut "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." Ludwig Wittgenstein In an influential article on the concept of truth in scientific language, Polish logician and mathematician Alfred Tarski advanced a detailed analysis of what constitutes a "true sentence" (Tarski, 1933). According to Tarski's semantic theory of truth, a
The work is created exactly as they created it, and therefore truth exists insofar as the work exists. Yet this is as far as truth can be observed in a work of fiction, because the narrator/speaker is always different from the author, and therefore the text we read as relayed by this narrator/speaker is only as reliable as they themselves. This is made explicitly clear in stories told from
Truth and Error in Science The relationship between reason, truth, and belief is one of the central questions of the philosophy of science, and has been addressed by nearly all of the major scientific thinkers. In 1880, the famous scientific thinker and professor Thomas Huxley claimed that "irrationally held truths may be more harmful [to science] than reasoned errors" (qtd. In Bridges, 93). This claim gets to the heart of problems
Truth in Sentencing Efficacy Truth in Sentencing Research Proposal Researchers who study the economics of crime are interested in whether specific anti-crime legislation or initiatives can increase the 'cost' of committing criminal acts, thereby reducing crime rates (reviewed by Ross, 2012). The basic premise is that most criminals will use a rational process when deciding when and where to offend and that effective anti-crime efforts will displace criminal activity. For example, implementing
He believed that these functions and their personal elements can be separated only artificially. The personal element in the selective function is an aesthetic response, and in heuristic function it is a goal-directed striving as the following Polyani quote clarifies: Scientific passion serves also as a guide in the assessment of what is of higher and what of lesser interest; what is great in science, and what relatively slight. I