Cindy/Jiahan's blog post 4:

Finding Balance in Absurdity and Sorrow:

Both Murakami’s The Second Bakery Attack and Raymond Carver’s A Small Good Thing revolve around a shared theme: hunger and solace, loneliness and human connection — the ways we search for a small measure of goodness in the face of absurdity or sorrow. In these two short stories, the protagonists struggle against a sudden shift in fate and luck, finding themselves paralyzed, unable to respond swiftly — a delay that deepens the confusion and emotional turmoil within them. While Murakami's The Second Bakery Attack wraps a past symbolic hunger and personal loneliness in dreamy and whimsical layers, Carver reveals bare pain and the yearning for a gone, cherished presence with stillness, cold clarity, and stark realism. In addition, Murakami addresses symbolic hunger through an absurd, ceremonial act — a mystical and metaphorical robbery — which ultimately serves as a means to bring the newlyweds closer together; Carver, on the other hand, searches for a fleeting glimmer of goodness in the immediate aftermath of the loss of a beloved, innocent child. Both stories seek a form of healing — a process gently imbued with the warm, lingering scent of human warmth.

Doppelgänger and "the Sputnik Sweetheart"

Intriguing and amusingly, the conception of Doppelgänger （“A Doppelgänger is a person who looks exactly like someone else but is not related to them. In stories and myths, a doppelgänger is often a mysterious or ghost-like double of a person. It can represent a hidden side of someone, or a part of themselves they don’t understand. Sometimes, meeting a doppelgänger is seen as a sign of bad luck or a deep change”）appears several times in our readings by far, as in Poe's "William Wilson", and in "the Sputnik Sweetheart". The theme of Doppelgänger is frequently used in many literary and artistic works and myths (like in Motojirō Kajii's The Ascension of K, or K's Drowning, and Franz Schubert's Der Doppelgänger) which often symbolizes death, split of the self, or encountering the otherworldly. In Murakami’s work, encountering a Doppelgänger creates a dreamlike and ambivalent boundary between reality and the subconscious, evoking a sense of existential dislocation and emotional estrangement.