Comparisons in Magical Thinking

By George Vos

Magical thinking plays a major role in “The Carnival” by Lille Carré; “Man of Steel” by Bryan Furuness; and “Like I Was Jesus” by Rachel Aviv.  Each author offers different reasons for their subjects’ magical thinking, and varied consequences from the magical thinking.  This essay will present, compare and contrast the reasons for and consequences of magical thinking in each work.

In the graphic story “The Carnival,” by Lille Carré, magical thinking provides an escape for the characters.   Henry, the story’s main character, is mired in a mundane reality.  He passively accepts failure at his job and querulous neighbors at home. When Henry’s apartment floods, rather than cleaning up, he escapes on a long aimless car drive before checking into a seedy motel.  Henry is lying on the motel bed when he remembers seeing a carnival nearby and decides to go.  At the carnival we see that Henry cannot cope with even the mildest stress; playing a midway game makes him shake and sweat profusely.  He sees the young woman playing next to him win a prize and musters the courage to start a conversation; she asks him to take her and her son on the Ferris wheel.  The wheel stops near the top and as the seat sways Henry grows nauseous and panicky.  The woman tells him to imagine he is somewhere else; Henry closes his eyes and commences magical thinking.  He is transported to an Eden-like garden, and is sitting by a pond with the woman, who is naked from the waist up.  He lives in this vision until he is back on the ground.  The woman and her son drive Henry to his motel and he invites them in.  While the boy takes a bath Henry and the woman begin to take off each other’s clothes.  The stress makes Henry sweat and shake and he cannot carpe diem.  Henry awakes alone the next morning, retrieves his car at the carnival and drives back to work.  After the woman drops off her son at school she indulges herself in magical thinking, or possibly magic; she lets the hot wind pick her up and float her away.  When she soars over Henry’s workplace he can’t believe he sees her.  As soon as Henry returns to his still-wet apartment a neighbor barges in and begins to kvetch at him.  Rather than listening to the tirade, Henry closes his eyes and escapes to his magical garden.  Henry and the woman use magical thinking to escape from their mundane and constricting lives.  Henry runs off from unpleasant situations to his garden while the woman soars on the wind far away from her small town.  Both characters’ magical worlds make the real world disappear. 

In Bryan Furuness’ short story “Man of Steel” a ten year-old boy named Revie allows magical thinking to take control of his life.  Revie, who was abandoned by his mentally ill mother, lives unhappily with his father, who doesn’t know how to care for him.  He spends most of his time alone, immersed in thought.  When he views a TV commercial that claims premonitions can predict the future, he believes in his own power of foresight.  Revie begins to hear voices and see visions that predict events.  The predictions are ambiguous but Revie believes they have come to pass.  Magical thinking starts to warp Revie’s life.  He spends hours in the bathroom talking to himself; when his father finally pries the door open Revie jumps fully clothed into the shower.  Revie’s magical thinking turns into obsessive-compulsive behavior and begins to harm himself to make predictions come true or keep them from happening.  Revie’s father becomes increasingly worried about his behavior until the conflict reaches a boiling point.  As his father is leaving the house to attend a church social, Revie reveals a vision of his father dying in a car accident.  The pronouncement so terrifies the father that he loses self-control. He drags Revie into his car for a frightening high-speed drive that ends in the church parking lot.  Inside the parked car, Revie’s father promises not to ignore his son’s mental illness like he ignored it in Revie’s mother.  This event brings father and son together and Revie ceases his magical thinking.

The essay “Like I Was Jesus” by Rachel Aviv studies of group of young evangelical Christians and their prey.  The evangelicals have so completely internalized fundamentalist Christian mythology that their magical thinking and the real world are intertwined.  When an evangelist sees a sign warning trespassers they will be prosecuted, she reads it as “persecuted,” a concept more real in her mind.  The evangelicals indoctrinate young children in fundamentalist Christian dogma before they are old enough to distinguish between reality and fancy.  The dogma is translated into a form that can be taught to the very young.  The vivid pictures of Jesus and a bearded, white-haired all-seeing God are perceived as real by the young children, as real as other figments of their imagination, and as real as the evangelicals believe them to be.  The evangelicals’ want the children to be inculcated with this magical thinking, so it becomes their reality for the rest of their lives.

Although all three works describe magical thinking, the types and uses of magical thinking each author depicts are very different.  Henry and the woman in “The Carnival” use magical thinking as an escape mechanism. Revie’s magical thinking in “Man of Steel” is an attempt to gain control over what he perceives to be a frightening, out-of-control world.  For the evangelicals in “Like I Was Jesus” magic thinking is their world.  There are also differences in passive versus active magical thinking.  Henry’s magical thinking is passive; it doesn’t strongly affect his day-to-day life.  For Revie, as well as the evangelicals, magical thinking is active, with a powerful role in daily life.  The magical thinking in each work show differing degrees of pathology.  Henry’s magical thinking is relatively harmless while Revie’s became destructively pathological; one can argue the evangelicals’ magical thinking shows some pathology as well.  “The Carnival” and “Man of Steel” have a striking divergence with “Like I Was Jesus” in how the protagonists share magical thinking.  Henry doesn’t share his magical thinking with anyone and Revie only shares with his father in what he believes to be a moment of danger.  In contrast, the evangelicals’ raison d’être is sharing their magical thinking with as many people as possible.  In summary, “The Carnival” and “Man of Steel” and “Like I Was Jesus” portray magical thinking very differently.