It’s funny that I started out writing the blog assignment for Till We Have Faces with the intention of doing a parody. That idea slowly changed and evolved as I wrote. I was going to satire the concept of an unforgiving and judging god, the kind of god who is just as much endorsed by Christian theology just as much as a loving, merciful god is. I was going to show how her disbelief in the invisible god would lead her to an eternity of damnation and suffering. While I kept the eternity and damnation part in the story, I changed my approach to what that would look like exactly, and how she would get there.
Throughout Till We Have Faces Orual was thoroughly ignorant of the wrongness in her deeds. She presented to the reader ample justification for why she was in the right, though we know just be reading her tainted thought-process that she was clearly in the wrong. Constantly she would blame others instead of blaming herself, and her pride disabled her from believing her sister. Her biggest fallacy, of course, was that she sought to own people. She was so prideful that people became mere property to her.
Well, instead of a happier resolution with her and Psyche taking a stroll and going over everything Psyche had endured for her, I was for some reason drawn to a more horrific ending. What attracted me to such a terrifying conclusion stirred questions of interest and wonder in me. Perhaps I can relate to Orual in her ignorance, and perhaps I wanted her damned because of that. I thought it would be more interesting and have more impact (for me at least) to witness Orual refusing to see the god, but instead projecting her image upon it, and then going back to not seeing it (or hearing it) completely. I ended the story eerily with Orual kwnoing that Psyche was right and there was a loving god trying to reach her, but her choosing the contentment of torture instead. I suppose by writing this I wanted to show how often people are the creators of their own misery and hell. It is sad and disturbing to see from an outside point of view how people can often do this to themselves, and how often I do this to myself.
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