more thoughts

I've tried for the last hour to post a comment on my own blog. I can't figure it out! Here's what I was going to say in response to my last post:

Thanks for the link, Danica. I liked Margaret Atwood's point that there's never any mention of the students eating or smelling anything. Presumably they eat (as they wait in a queue at lunch), but there's no description of it. I had also noticed that there's very little detail given about what Kathy, Tommy and Ruth look like. My idea of them is different from how they'll appear in the upcoming movie. Keira Knightley as Ruth? Not even close to what I had pictured.

Ms. Dorais: Ah, the weather as natural/unnatural...that makes sense. In terms of the weather being an environmental body, it's perhaps a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when humans mess about with the "natural" order of things. I like the idea of weather as a trope for the students!

I had to miss class last Thursday, so I've been attempting to glean what I can from the posts of others. It sounds as though there was a science vs. emotion debate. It made me think of something I read in one of my textbooks last spring. The author brought up the idea of replacing body parts with machines rather than living tissue. The idea was thought-provoking. Say it were possible to replace anything defective or missing with something inorganic. What if you were rather unfortunate and needed to replace every cell and system in your body? At what point, if ever, would you be considered a machine? Would you lose whatever it is that makes you human?

The novel spends a good deal of time discussing the soul, and how the students' artwork is important in proving that they have souls. The existence of the soul would indicate that they are human, but I wonder how this is fair. How would Miss Emily or Madame (or anyone else for that matter) prove the existence of their own souls? What is a soul and where does it reside? Why is the soul a prerequisite for being human?