"We Travel the Spaceways" Paper

 Fisk Candau

Dr Ellis

EN376 

6 Nov 2023


    One thing I found very interesting in "We Travel the Spaceways" was the emphasis on trusting your intuition. 

    While the protagonist calls himself crazy at several parts of the novella, he never really doubts that the soda bottles are vessels for the gods and always does whatever they tell him to. This was especially interesting when it comes to Kim, who had the same kind of trust in her intuition. 

    Rather than questioning whether the cans are actually vessels for the gods or if the visions they have are real, they just accept that everything is real. This is indicative of them trusting their intuition on a base level, even when it seems kind of crazy.

    This emphasis on trusting your intuition is important within the novella because, without the trust, none of the events or rediscovering of the gods would have happened in the first place. 

    It is also important to note that the characters' intrinsic trust in their intuition takes precedence over how they appear to others. This is especially evident in the protagonist committing arson to the churches and mosques to make it seem like a hate crime (which I didn't really understand) in order to have a vision of the spaceship and star, even though he doesn't actually believe in the stuff his actions convey to others, and the main reason that he doesn't want to get caught and identified with the crimes isn't because he doesn't want people to think he as a person is a domestic terrorist who holds all these horrible beliefs, but because he will get arrested and no longer will be able to carry out the missions from the gods. Theidea of intuition being valued over the opinions of others is really interesting to me because it makes me wonder how many other people in that universe had had the same reaching out by the gods, but instead rejected it and blocked it out for fear of looking crazy to the people around them. It also goes against so much of what our society tells us to care about, since there is such a big emphasis put on the importance of appearances and placing value on the opinions of others in our world. 

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