Sophie's World #4

Okay. Wow.  A lot happened in these last few chapters. We learned that Sophie and Alberto and Joanna and Hermes and everyone in the story don’t actually exist, they’re all just characters in a book. Hilde is a real girl and Albert, her father, wrote this book for her birthday. From what we’ve been reading so far Sophie and Alberto are our reality. We live in their world and they’re teaching us about the world around them. We’re not sure who Hilde and Albert are, or even if they;’re real people. However we then learn that in fact Hilde and Albert are the only ones who are real, that he completely made up Sophie and Albert. It throws the reader completely for a loop and makes us question everything that we thought we knew. It makes the characters in Sophie’s go through the same thing. Sophie questions what’s real. Is she? Is anything? I'm confused as to how Sophie can even be having those thoughts. I mean obviously Albert is writing her to have them and is making her go through this dilemma, but it’s making my head hurt. He made a character which I once thought was a person go to a completely 2-D character made of nothing but words and then gave that character humanistic qualities such as questioning one's existence. Hilde talks about how she feels like Sophie is real and how she wants to meet her. If at some point later on in this book they do somehow meet, I think my brain might explode. Alberto is talking about how Albert is like their god and how they need to come up with a plan to escape this all. They know that they are characters in a book, so how can they think about “escaping”? What does that even mean? Alberto said that it’s not whether they are, but what we are and who we are. He is telling Sophie that they do exist. I don’t know what to think and it’s getting very exciting. However, for the first time in a while I’m enjoying this book and I want to keep reading. It’s like a mystery and I need to figure out how it ends.

These chapters remind me a lot of the movie Inception. The movie is about dreams and going into people’s dreams and manipulating them. It seems just like reality and a lot of the time people don’t know they’re dreaming. Once they do figure it out they have to deal with the fact that nothing around them is real and they themselves aren’t really real. That’s a lot like what’s happening in Sophie’s World. Sophie and Alberto have just realized that they’re in a story and nothing around them is real.     Sophie is experiencing some existential dread and Alberto tries to reassure her that all will be okay. Once they’ve realize that they’re in this “dream” of sorts they have to realize how to get out. In Inception a lot of the time people want to escape the dreams and don’t like the fact that nothing around them is real. There can even be dreams within a dream, which is kind of like this book within a book.