What Are The Flaws Of Fact

Everywhere we look informing oppositions can be found, such as good and evil, life and death, macrocosm and microcosm. But what people fail to see is that two opposing forces in or own bodies clash on a daily basis. The structured, linear brain clashes with the nonlinear, unpredictable heart causing a rift in almost everyone’s body. While some may choose to follow one or the other force, others may ignore both forces. Ignoring one or both forces entirely is dangerous and in order to find fulfillment needed in one’s life it is all about balance. In Charles Dickens Hard Times for these Times, the citizens of a town called Coketown are only exposed to Fact, however soon the lives of a particular family, the Gradgrinds, are changed forever when

When Louisa confronts her father about her upbringing she states, “how could you give me life, and take from me all the inapprieciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul…the sentiment of my heart…[and] the garden that should have bloomed here once” (218). The failures of an all fact based life, represented by Louisa, is the heart and soul’s inability to develop. Since her life has never been revived from her “death” she will never be able to find fulfillment. The detrimental effects of an all Fact life is demonstrated at the end of the book with Louisa, “she, grown learned of childish lore…she holding this course as part of no fantastic vow, or bond, or fancy dress, or fancy fair, but simply as a duty to be done” (300).In the end, Louisa is able to recognize Fancy, however she fails to embrace and open her heart to Fancy. This inability to reach a balance between Fact and Fancy ultimately prevents her from reaching clear vision, thus she comes to a miserable end despite what she has been through. On the opposite side, the down falls of a fanciful upbringing is shown through Sissy’s insecurities, “what a stupid girl I am. All through school hours I make mistakes…I can’t help them. They seem to come natural to me” (62). Sissy’s fanciful upbringing prevents her from understanding what numbers mean in a

Sleary. Mr. Sleary is the proprietor of the circus that Signor Jupe performs in and he is described as having, “one fixed eye and one loose eye” (42). This is the symbolic representation of Mr. Sleary and the nexus because he has a secure, linear eye and a loose, nonlinear eye. So with his eyes he literally can see both linear and nonlinear at the same time representing his balance. Since he is a proprietor of a business, he has the factual knowledge of running a successful business while understanding and spreading Fancy with his circus. He demonstrates that he does have both linear and nonlinear knowledge when he sends Sissy to live with the Gradgrind’s because he knows that if Sissy is exposed to Fact, she will be closer to the nexus and more balanced than if she stayed with the circus. Even Louisa realizes that learning Fact through Fancy is better than learning purely fact stating that she, “had hoped and imagined; of how, first, coming upon Reason through the tender light of Fancy, she had seen it a beneficent god deferring to gods as great as itself: not a grim Idol, cruel and cold” (201). Louisa sees that if she learned Fact through Fancy, she would still have her heart and she would still be a human. However, since she never had Fancy before, she was now a stone idol that was controlled by Fact. Mr. Sleary’s