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In “The Elephant Vanishes” by Haruki Murakami, the narrator is obsessed with an old elephant that his town comes in possession of. Strangely the Elephant mirrors the narrator and the parallels can be seen in a couple of ways. One of the ways is in the way he describes his job. He says it’s “not the kind of work that takes a great deal of intelligence, but I had to see to it that the articles they wrote didn’t smack of advertising.”(460) In short, this quote wraps up how the narrator finds his job mindless, monotonous, and weather the narrator acknowledges it or not, a barrier from normal social interactions. This social barrier is similar to the elephant’s everyday life. “…unconscious of the enormous chunk of metal wrapped around its leg. It kept its blank gaze fixed on some indeterminate point in space…”(456). In the narrators case the chunk of metal would be things like his marketing lines that make it awkward to talk normally, the indeterminate point he focuses on would be the elephant case, and in general the blank gaze is caused by his lack of interest in his work, which is learned when he speaks frankly with the Editor.

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