How is Jack's philosophy on life evolving?
Jack is a complex character who is constantly being shaped by the people he interacts with and the various events that have occurred in his past. At a young age, he was abandoned by the Scholarly Attorney and then sent off to a boarding school by his mother. These early traumatic experiences caused him to partially resent these people, and also led to his “Great Sleeps,” as he got older. In one of Jack’s “Great Sleeps,” he is bombarded with the new thought that his wife, Lois, is actually a human and not just a “luscious machine.” Unable to manage his thoughts and confused about how to handle this due to his traumatic early years, he falls under the second Great Sleep, “Then came the final phase, the phase of the Great Sleep. I had once before experienced this...and so I knew the symptoms of its coming on. Immediately after dinner every evening, I went to bed and slept soundly, with the sweet feeling of ever falling toward the center of delicious blackness, until the last possible moment...”(427). At this point, he is struggling to find reason in his life, and the meaning of his past experiences and events. He is overwhelmed with his thoughts, and pushes himself to this Great Sleep to hide from it all. Later on he comes up with the Great Twitch theory, similar to the Great Sleep, in that it allows him to cope with the fact that his one true love, Anne, is sleeping with Willie Talos. He develops the idea that people are just twitches and impulses, and therefore feelings and emotions are not real. “And if I was all twitch how did the twitch which was me know that the twitch was all?...That is the secret knowledge. That is why you have to go to California to have a mystic vision to find out. That the twitch can know that the twitch is all”(439). Like the Great Sleep, he comes up with this theory to deal with the stress and sorrow in his life. This is just one of many of Jack’s philosophies about life. As he continues to reflect on these past experiences and tries to make meaning of them all, his philosophies evolve to enable him to come to terms with his life events, and keep functioning.
Jack is constantly trying to figure out what he needs to do to get his mind right. That's why he does through the great sleep and heads West. He heads west to help himself figure things out and much like his great sleep he just looses himself when he makes that trip. "That's why I drowned West and relived my life like a home movie" (431). He was being influenced by his past so he went westward to figure things out. His past influenced him so much to thew point that he had to take a breather to clear his head.
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