Zichao Cong
Professor Lee
The Rhetorical Analysis Final Draft
02/20/2022
Stranding
Although West Germany began to flourish after the transition to capitalism during the Cold war, a spiritual vacuum remained that haunted the nation because material prosperity could not fulfill people’s emptiness inside after the defeat of WWII, the shame over what Nazism had done, and the friction between the superpowers in the Cold War. In The Neverending Story, Bastian is reading a book of the same name, which he later teleports to the land of Fantastica to cooperate with Atreyu and assist the Childlike Empress with saving the world. In writing this book, Michael Ende resolved to become the light that drives out Nihilism through “regaining of a clear vision.” (Tolkien 19) By writing the book the Neverending Story, Ende wants to alarm the public about the effect of three distinct types, existential, will to power, and passive/desperaring, of Nihilism and their potential influence on man, which can be overcome by searching for meaning and love.
According to Alan Pratt, Nihilism is a belief that values are baseless and nothing can be known or communicated, which is associated with extreme pessimism and skepticism toward existence. For example, a person’s existence is similar to a tiny sand grain that composed the entire dune. However, no matter how hard or how much people thrive in their lives, nothing will change because the sand grain is so small compared to the overwhelming amount of grains in the dune. In the Never Ending Stories, Michael Ende focuses on Nothing, which relates to Nihilism.
Morla, the tortoise, disguises existential Nihilism representing a person’s selfishness to fulfill his desires regardless of others’ feelings and sacrifices. When Atreyu initially began his search for Bastian, he entered the Swamp of Sadness to Morla for help. However, Morla held a pessimistic view of the world by claiming the whole Fantastica was meaningless as nothing mattered to her, which implicitly emphasizes to Bastian that Artax’s, Bastian’s loyal horse, death in the Swamp of Sadness was in vain to change the destiny of Fantastica. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism, he wrote, “Atheistic existentialism … declares that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it.”[8] In other words, man is not definable until he wills himself to be. In particular, after various experiences in Fantastica, Morla’s spontaneously pessimistic wills chained her to Existential Nihilism and mired herself incrementally by submitting to meaningless. Perhaps, Morla thought that accepting Existential Nihilism would help her become an intact figure by solely “loving herself '' regardless of others. However, it eventually closed her mind by psychologically constructing walls around her heart as a defense mechanism for her own selfish will. Gradually, the overwhelming desire leaked from Morla’s desire, which reified the Swamp of Sadness that repelled people from seeing her. Even when Atreyu appeared to be the first person that Morla encountered through the years, she was still reluctant to offer any help to save Fantastica, and her “dark, empty, pond-sized eyes paralyzed [Atreyu]’s thought (Ende 64).” “Dark” emphasized Morla’s severe Nihilism erosion, and “empty” depicted Morla as a creature with a lack of thought and purpose. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, “What man needs is to find himself and understand that nothing can save him from himself.”[8] Therefore, if Morla continued to “love” herself in a selfish way, Nihilism would not help her to become a complete figure but make her vulnerable empty shell that anyone can manipulate. Since everything did not matter, it was not a matter for Morla to tell Atreyu how to save Fantastica, and she did say the answer anyway. Hence, Existential Nihilism was not a way to become a person that one wants to be but an excuse for a person to be selfish and only care about himself.
Bastian’s challenge lies in wielding authority without losing his sense of self; however, he incrementally emptied himself with the material goods through the will to power while losing his soul. During the second half of the story, Bastian teleported to the world of Fantastica, and he successfully saved the world by giving a new name to the Childlike Empress. Even though Bastian and Atreyu held the same desire to save Fantastica from the Childlike Empress's call, Bastian did not want to obey the authority to find his direction in life. Instead, he chose to wield authority justly without losing himself. Although the intention of Bastian was good, his rebellion did not clear another route to help him find his direction but gradually eroded him into Nihilism. By the Amulet’s power, Bastian utilized this power to “love” himself by transforming him from a short, chubby boy to an attractive, irresistible prince. With each wish came reality, a part of Bastian’s memory, and his desire faded away. Bastian gradually became invincible with all the power, but he emptied himself off and forgot who he was. As a result, such excessive abuse of power made him lose his way to find his identity rather than define himself. Similar to the students in the 1968 Western Germany Sex Revolution, they were born with the tag and the stereotype for being the descendants of Nacism, which makes these students want to cut off this connection by arguing “it was the sadomasochistic psychic structure produced by the petty bourgeois authoritarian nuclear family” among with “the original suppression of sexual drives that created the vital displeasure” made “the Germans to become a people of racist murderer. (Herzog 401 & Unmut)”[5] Nevertheless, the revolution did not solve the problem. It functioned the opposite effect, which made people “love” themselves individually by selfishly becoming what they desire regardless of the feelings of others. Unfortunately, this theory “mistakenly assumed that there was an innate aggressive drive in human beings” and eventually would distance people from one another to form a vacuum society as people merely focusing on their own selfishness (Herzog402). Therefore, by the time Bastian became the emperor, he became a void shell that lost the fundamental essence of human: soul, resulting from Nihilistic erosion called the Power to Will.
Contrary to Atreyu’s Active Nihilism, Passive Nihilism is the process of adopting the current circumstances while not promoting any changes to make a difference through the depiction of Bastian’s father: Barney Bux. In the old days, Barney constantly played with Bastian, and he cared about Bastian as much as he could. However, the death of Bastian’s mother struck Barney on his knees and haunted him for years. From that time, “[Bastian] couldn’t talk to his father anymore. There was an invisible wall around his father, and no one could get through him … [Barney] had only looked at [Bastian] in his sad, absent way, and Bastian felt that as far as his father was concerned he wasn’t there at all (Ende 37).” This sentence vividly presented the most tragic scene in the book because this invisible wall cut down barney’s relationship with others and his significant kinship to his son. Similar to Russian Author Anton Chekhov’s The Man in The Case (Человек в футляре), Barney was locking himself behind the walls and afraid to see the world around him. In other words, Barney was experiencing Passive Nihilism “as decline and recession of the power of the spirit (Nietzsche 17),” which made her become the conservative figure that postpones new progress and obstacles to changes. Passive Nihilism could not resurrect Bastian’s mother but deepened him in depression through denial of reality and ignoring the meaningful things around him at the given moment. Fortunately, the disappearance of Bastian became a catalyst for Barney to wreck the invisible wall and realize his duty to his son. As Bastian returned from Fantastica, Barney “listened as he had never listened before,” and Bastian noticed “tears in his father’s eyes (Ende 440).” Even though Bastian spilled the Water of Life on his way back to the real world and did not give Barney to drink it, the essence of the story was not the water but the capability to love. René Girard once stated that “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”[2] When Bastian was in Fantastica, he received generous love from Dame Eyola. In particular, this is a comprehensive but holy love because Dame Eyola did not discriminate and judge Bastian for his past but accepted all his mistakes and flaws in hoping to find himself. In addition, this love originated from the Bible as Jesus was born in Shepherd’s stable but not in a luxurious grand because he wants to love people by embracing poverty and humility regardless of one’s misbehavior. Hence, this love of forgiveness was overwhelming to Bastian because it made him become an intact person by compensating his deficiency of maternal love but also acquired the desire to love his father and accept Barney's imperfections as a father. Analogically, Barney intimated the willingness to love by admitting his past and becoming a better person. Thus, even though Passive Nihilism could mire a person to deep depression and numb an individual. However, Passive Nihilism is curable through the love of accepting one’s past and looking forward to becoming a better man in the future.
Through two Bastian and Barney’ resistance and Morla’s submission to the Nothing, Michael Ende revealed that Nihilism could appear in different forms to interrupt one’s life, which is not only a threat in the story but also a fundamental challenge for humans to become intact people through the search for meaning. The experience of Morla indicated Existential Nihilism as one’s selfish will regardless of others’ feelings; the experience of Bastian revealed Nihilism as a person lost under temptation from the Will of Power; Barney’s experience illustrated Nihilism as one’s unwillingness to accept the truth. Nihilism is horrifying, but the way we cope determines the outcome. If we do not choose the right way to counter these obstacles, they will haunt us for the rest of our lives. Therefore, the key to driving out Nihilism lies in becoming the prisoner that confronts the actual fire in Plato’s the Allegory of the Cave and “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them” rather than numbing oneself to the shadow of the fire on the wall (Tolkien 19).
As Gyro Zeppeli in Hirohiko Araki’s comic JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run said, “The shortest route was a detour. It was a detour that was our shortest path.” In the Neverending Story, the Amulet blissed “candidates” who choose to chase after the “wishes” and “results” incrementally lose their directions and are constrained in the City of the Old Emperors from the path to reality. However, emperors like Bastian, among the many others who entered the world of Fantastica, eventually found their way back home after a traumatic journey. Like our lives, sometimes we become too obsessed with the “results” but ignore the essentiality of “the process.”As a person merely looking for the “good result,” he would find every possible shortcut to make things easier on him. However, such blindly chasing would mislead the person away from the truth and gradually lose their way because the “inevitable progression” is the key to making him qualified for the result and becoming the person eligible to find the way of life and drive out the darkness of Nihilism.
Work Cited
“Active vs. Passive Nihilism.” The Anarchist Library, 2012, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-active-vs-passive-nihilism.
Andrade, Gabriel. “Girard, Rene | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, iep.utm.edu/girard. Accessed 5 Feb. 2022.
Ende, Michael, and Ralph Manheim. The Neverending Story. Puffin Books, 1993.
Flieger, Verlyn. Tolkien on Fairy-Stories. UK ed., HarperCollins Publishers, 2014.
Herzog, Dagmar. “‘Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together’: Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, 1998, pp. 393–444. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.1086/448879.
Murphy, Tom. “Nothing.” Brtom, www.brtom.org/gr/nothing.html. Accessed 21 Feb. 2022.
Pratt, Alan. “Nihilism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.” Internet Encyclopedia Of Philosophy, iep.utm.edu/nihilism. Accessed 21 Feb. 2022.
Sartre, Jean paul, and Philip Mairet. “Existentialism Is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre 1946.” Marxists Internet Archive, 1956, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm.
The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche (1968–08-12). Vintage; edition (1968–08-12), 2022.
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