English 738T, Spring 2015
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Team 3: Caleb Williams + The Matrix

Posted by Jennifer Ausden on Thursday, April 12th, 2012 at 7:51 pm

[T3: if you should spot any edit opportunities in the below transcription, please feel free to either edit/repost or drop me a note. Cheers!]

Top seven connections between Caleb Williams and The Matrix:

1) Both Neo & Caleb lack familial bonds; moreover, ties to a system

2) Red pill scene vs.  scene in which Falkland tells Caleb the truth

3) Agent Smith pursues Neo; Gines pursues Caleb [as Caleb laments, "he the persecutor, I the persecuted” (306)]

4) Caleb: “mind is master of itself” (188) versus Neo: “there is no spoon”…further, Neo’s resurrection moment is parallel to Caleb’s speculation, “what power can cause that man to die, whose soul commands him to continue to live?” (156) 

5) Society (and dreams that interrogate it)
* Caleb = “My resentment was not restricted to my prosecutor, but extended itself to the whole machine of society” (183); Matrix takes social machinery to a literal level. (An important contrast to Neo, though: Caleb remains within the machine as a prisoner in both endings; in the first, in bearing Falkland’s burden he essentially remains his prisoner, and in the second, he’s literally imprisoned)
* Caleb = “I have dreams, strange dreams, I never know what they are about” / Neo initially understands his visions through “strange dreams” that too interrogate his “conscious” experience

6) Caleb calling self murderer = Neo conquering Matrix
* Caleb gains a sense of agency by calling himself Falkland’s murderer…he “disrupted the system” of servitude, and subverts interpolation
*And yet, perhaps he only “resets” the system: for ex., the Architect mentions previous matrices, involving “resetting” the model each time, with slight adjustments…Caleb too only ”resets” the system, and to change, in fact to become Falkland, he must commit murder himself

7) Caleb & Cypher both seek to escape “things as they are”

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