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The Yellow Pill Essay

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Sanity is in the mind of the beholder; one man’s reality may not be the reality of society. This becomes a sticking point when two men meet in either a psychiatrist’s office or in the depths of space in the short story “The Yellow Pill.” Since both men cannot be in reality, the story takes place in an uncomfortable spaceship based on evidence from the story. In the “Yellow Pill”, it is described by Jerry that all the characters in the story are inhabitants of a spaceship on the planet Venus. This claim is later backed up by another character “Dr. Elton. While setting the scene, Jerry can be quoted saying, "I blasted five Venusian lizard pirates who boarded our ship, and melted the door off of one gear locker and seared the paint on two others. …show more content…

Elton” says to his receptionist, Helena Fitzroy, “They almost triple the strength of nerve currents from end organs. What results is that reality practically shouts down any fantasy insertions,” (Phillips 5). After more than one meeting with Jerry, “Dr. Elton” starts to gain suspicion of what reality is. He later decides to take the pill to gain a certain reality. “As she tried to get it away from him, he evaded her and put it in his mouth. A loud gulp showed he had swallowed it. He sat back and looked up at Helena curiously,” (Phillips 8). Soon after taking the pill “Dr.Elton” saw exactly what Jerry was talking about at the beginning of the story. “On the other side of the control room lay Jerry Bocek, his back propped against one of the four gear lockers, sound asleep, with so many ropes wrapped around him that it would probably be impossible for him to stand up. Against the far wall were three other gear lockers, two of them with their paint badly scorched, the third with its door half melted off,” (Phillips 8). From the point that “Dr. Elton” takes the pill, he can no longer deny that Jerry was right and that he was living a delusion that no one else shared with him. The environment he is now in was precisely what Jerry described it to be when they first …show more content…

However, it presumes that the only way to walk into the room is exclusively from outside. There are multiple moments in the story that give us reasons to believe the room they are in is surrounded by neighboring quarters that are connected. “He frowned, then went to the small square of one-way glass in the reception-room door and looked through it,” (Phillips 2). This quote explains that it is possible for there to be neighboring rooms to the reception room because a character is able to look into the reception room through the window of another room that is adjacent to it. Later, there is a scene in which a character left a room and ventured to another. That is known to be true because Phillips depicts, "Now we know how the patient must feel," Cedric said, crossing the reception room to his office door,” (Phillips 5). Upon leaving the room “Cedric” does not equip himself with any breathing apparatus or other cautionary space equipment. This means that he made his way to another room and not outside, or else he would die. Finally, what some people think about the setting of the story on Earth is invalid because Phillips also writes "Oh," Cedric

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