Overthinking

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje
Close reading page 15

The following passage was used in this close reading:

"But his own mind was helpless against every moment´s headline.He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so that eventually he was almost completly governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Bora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable.Breaking chairs and windows glass doors in fury of her certain answers."(Coming Through Slaughter, pg 15)

In the first sentence you could infer that Bolden over thought everything. Instead of letting his thoughts think of what could happen he let them become absorbed by “the headline“ of ideas he was thinking of. Bolden over thinks everything that crosses his path as shown in this quote, “He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so that eventually he was almost completely governed by fears of certainty.” From this quote you could infer that Bolden tried to understand everything to the fullest and in the end he was sure of so many things, he knew too much.

Usually when a person knows too much about something they start to not believe in other ideas and become closed off to the world. It can be thought of as paranoia to the unknown. The next sentences talk about how certainty became an enemy and he attacked it. Bolden felt he knew too much and lashed out on the world for the things he understood to be true. He envies Nora for being, in a sense, naive and lashes out in anger because he can’t understand how it is she keeps going on through life so uncertain.