Briefing For A Descent Into Hell

13 Pages 3249 Words

r. These features are determined mostly by genetics. However, the personal traits, such as the ability to be a good leader or to be funny and friendly, are characteristics that a person may develop over a lifetime and are warrant to change because variance in lifestyles, beliefs, past experiences and memories, or social influences. Even though Charles and Sinbad are essentially the same person, the fact that the contributing factors that make up their personalities are so contradictory of each other, they end up as extremely different people. Charles lived the life of a successful professor, with a wife and two boys, he had been a veteran of the Vietnam war and now enjoyed going to the lake on the weekends and giving lectures about anthropology. Charles was described by, Felicity Watkins, his wife as “…the opposite of the kind of person who would have a breakdown… He has always been energetic and gets a lot of things done… He always works hard” (156) Contrary to Charles, Sinbad lived in a place where civilization did not exist; a place in which he was very alone, and a place where he had no prior memories other than those of the crystal ship. After he wandered into an abandoned, ruined, stone city his natural instincts to survive became the only thing that he knew, “I drank water- and I understood that my needs as an animal were met. I need do nothing but pick fruit and gather fresh leaves when those that made my bed withered.” (52) In that section of the story Sinbad became someone very simple minded with no set tasks, doing what he felt, when he felt necessary; a lifestyle completely opposite than that of the professor’s.
Charles Watkin’s experienced various hallucinations and many visions while suffering from amnesia that seemed a reality to him and eventually, they indeed became his reality. A shipwrecked sailor searching for the aliens that were holding his shipmates captive became Charles’ new ident...