The past couple days I have sat down to read this book and give it my undivided attention. However, then i got to the chapter about Sonmi-451 and found myself quickly losing focus. Although I do think that I have started to find out how these chapters and this book is all starting to connect I am still having a problem enjoying it.
When i got to the chapter on Sonmi-451 I immediately realized that this was a chapter set in the future. It seems as if it is set in the 22nd or 23rd century and things seem to be far different than they are now. One thing I really liked about this chapter was the set-up and how it is in an interview form. I like the set-up because I think it a lot easier to follow and I think it works really well for this chapter considering this is supposed to be set in a completely different time period than we are in today. At first I had a hard time figuring out what the chapter meant, and then after I realized that our characters name was Sonmi and his number that he was given in this society was probably 451. The thing about this chapter and this society is that it is a scary look at what the future of the world could be like. With big business controlling everything and everyone being brainwashed and really just being a number. It reminds me of other books such as The Giver or 1984where society is very controlled and there are no freedoms. It’s funny because this seems to be such a big topic to authors- how society can easily be controlled, especially by business, and how in the future life could be completely different then it is today. I really enjoyed for the first time in this book a character, Sonmi. I found her quite interesting due to the fact that she was trying to break away from this mold that society had put on her. She seems to be one of the only people (if she is even that) who has developed thoughts and wants to be more than just a robot-like person. She wants to be freed and learn to become a human with the potential to live a normal life and do things that real humans can do. I really thought that as a character she was the strongest one we have seen so far. She has such a great deal of passion and really seems to know as a character what she wants.
At the end of the Sonmi chapter we see that one of Sonmi’s favorite things to read is the The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. I really think that this is quite ironic considering every chapter has referred back to another piece of literature to kind of show how influential literature can be. All of these chapters or characters have been inspired by previous stories or characters. I think the author is trying to show how important literature really is and how one great piece of literature can really change and shape someone’s life.
