Her Expectations: A Survival Guide
Perhaps as is the case with each and every individual on some level, so it similarly goes for a particular young lady by the name of Matilda, that the will to live and live well is a deep seeded need at the very core of our being. Whether this is always accomplished is another matter, but it is the expectation of ourselves to strive at successfully carrying on that is relevant within this discussion. The character Matilda, who is referred to from the novel Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones, is a prime example of how despite the incessantly encountered tribulations from a journey called life, survival is innately within us. We thereby expect it of ourselves to do what is necessary in facing this issue and its various untamed forms. Despite our preferences, each and every kind of event may come at us right and left like bullets without a warning and at any time. It is how we deal with them that defines in large part the people that we truly are. And how it is we are defined plays a significant role in what might be called our overall stability of self and acceptance of fulfillment. In her encountering the highs and lows of life, Matilda plays the fictitious yet crucial role of one who chooses her survival through the methods providing her with the greatest possibility for a meaningful existence, something we can all learn from.
As a member of a community on the island Bougainville, off the coast of Papua New Guinea during the time of a civil war, Matilda is subjected to one atrocity after another. As a young girl in the midst of a difficult situation, it is natural that she clings to the first opportunity providing a mental escape, which plays a key role in her survival at this time. Here enters the eternally affecting Mr. Watts and his mysterious ways that will forever be with Matilda throughout her years both on and off of the island. As the only teacher figure available to Matilda and the other children, it is he who provides the material that may be used to avert attention from whatever hardships lay about. So it is the story from Charles Dickens known as Great Expectations that becomes the central source for learning and the distracting of Matilda’s desperate mind. With this story, she discovers an effective psychological retreat that carries her through until other methods of survival become required of her. But for a significant period of time, it is through a great work of fiction that gives shelter and allows Matilda’s expectations of herself and from life to continue in their evolution, as she grows as an individual. In finding a friend, a world and a home outside her own, she successfully moves on to find herself in new cycles and phases of a very particular journey.
While enduring the last few obstacles the island has to offer, Matilda encounters a much more dramatic reality the expectations of survival must be met with. After the death her mother, Mr. Watts, along with countless others from her village, Matilda is left with a memorable numbness that threatens her will for life most significantly. While she is walking through an increasingly thunderous rain, drained of any hope for escape to a different beginning, there comes the final test before descent from the land of rebels and redskins. Caught in a raging flood, it is a concrete physiological survival that is now required of her. And in the moments of expected death, she finds the will to fight for air to be restored in her lungs. When we think of survival, it is perhaps this distinct line between life and death that is most obvious. And while this certainly is a prominent component of the vast array, and one in which Matilda needed to experience, it is not the only form and perhaps not even the most important. After winning the physical struggle for life against the flood, it is almost as if she is immediately rewarded for her efforts by the boat that will essentially lead her onto a new life, away form all she has ever known up to that point.
Matilda re-meets her father in Australia where begins her search for a piece of her that appears to be missing. An incompleteness remains from the trauma now thousands of miles behind her, and in order for her continued survival it is information she seeks out. An education is what must be had in order to make progress that will mend the scars that have been laid upon her. To accomplish any kind of fulfillment, it is only to continue what she started that will suffice. To make further sense of what kept her going on the island is almost a tribute to those now deceased who were connected to it. So beginning with the story about a boy called Pip, Matilda encroaches upon the world of Mr. Dickens and his extensive literature. The tools needed to emerge into the world of learning have been acquired from the classroom once occupied with by Mr. Watts and the other children she had called friends. At this point where she is surrounded by a different kind of society, to learn is to live and therefore to survive. It appears to be the next necessary step forward. It might not have made sense at the time, but while Matilda fills her mind with all of the material she can get from higher education, she is simultaneously striving for a kind of unnamable truth; a greater meaning of who she is and what does in fact define her. This educational phase of many years is necessary for her later understanding of what it is that matters most, and could possibly constitute the answer for her ultimate survival and peace of mind.
One can become as informed and educated as possible, reading all of the books and doing all of the research, but still hit a dead end. Here Matilda emerges into a hole that for her leads to a depressive state, in which the only way out of is not within the already mastered academic world, but somewhere deeper inside of herself. She has met the challenges of many prior instances and in turn risen to the occasion so that the journey may continue. But at this point Matilda is now facing the biggest challenge of all. She finds that after making all of the possible motions that might lead to her eventual relief from days long behind her, there is nothing left to do and yet the hole inside of her is bigger than ever. And then out of her now well-developed sense of survival, she discovers a truth that had been beyond her for far too long. Her own individual voice that had once been noted by an old teacher as more important than anything, suddenly comes to mind. It is not other people, authors or characters that hold the key to her salvation, but the one and only story pertaining to none other than herself that suddenly becomes more relevant than anything else. And in this final act of survival instincts, Matilda begins to write. She writes the most sincere and real truth she has inside of her. And from all of the previous experience that has led her to this profound revelation, or rather an epiphany of sorts, the ultimate key to her being and continuing on, is finally discovered.
