Tiny Alice Themes

Tiny Alice Themes

Illusion and Reality

Julian is torn between conflicting desires for truth and illusion. He claims to respect only that which is real, but at the same time, he is drawn to the world of his imagination. He wants to worship God in the abstract form and he rails against those people who create God in their own image for their own purpose. This incompatibility of illusion and reality caused him to lose his faith, and thus his sanity, forcing him into the asylum. While in the asylum, he experienced even greater confusion about what was real and what was illusion. To the present day, he is never sure whether or not the sexual experience that he remembers did happen. When he tells Miss Alice about this, she wonders, "Is the memory of something having happened the same as it having happened?" vocally illustrating the sometimes unavoidable merging of illusion and reality. Julian's leave-taking...
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