preview

Peter Carey Bliss Essay

Decent Essays

Discussion, Bliss Chapter One
The book Bliss by Peter Carey starts with the death of the main character Harry Joy, but this is not how his story ends. Instead, his death changes his joyful and friendly character and gives his life a whole new direction. Harry Joy is a relatively successful man who has an advertisement agency and a family consist of his wife Bettina and his children Lucy and David. He can make friends easily and he is loved by people in general. After having a heart attack, he dies for nine minutes and he sees the Hell. After that point, he starts to be scared of Hell, and this fear causes him to ponder about his beliefs and his life. He tries to find a way to approach to the religion so that he would avoid going Hell. He searches …show more content…

Maybe it's a 'they' and not he. Maybe it's a great empty part of space charged with electricity. Maybe it's a whole lot of things in a spaceship and flying saucers are really angels.” (Carey, 19) This shows us that he actually starts to see the world in a different perspective. Business, numbers and daily concerns suddenly seem less important to him. He also begin to think of his own faults and tried to release of them, but he couldn’t run away from his own past. “Harry Joy could not give up his pain to anyone, that he would carry it with him to the operating theatre and to wherever place he went to afterwards.” (Carey, 20) As he cannot run away from the past wrongs, he couldn’t stop worry about the future. “Yes, he had been happy. Of course, he'd been happy. But he had always been happy in the expectation that something else would happen, some wonderful unnamed thing which he was destined for, some quivering butterfly dream soaked in sunlight in a doorway.” (Carey 21) What kept him happy all the time was his hopes and his dreams about the future, now he sees no dreams but a vision of Hell in his future, and that is when the fear and anxiety took the place of happiness in his heart. He was not only anxious for

Get Access