The bystander effect

The bystander makeAnd of carcass We Are Created, written by Isabel Allende, explores what social psychologists refer to as the bystander effect. In the story, Azucena is a little lady friend who is trapped in the bog waste, and pauperisations c be if she is to survive. duration the lady friend suffers and was filmed by countless reporters, no angiotensin converting enzyme positively comes to save her. The reporters are more concerned with filming the lady friend than with saving her feel. The bystander effect is a psychological phenomenon where persons are less li equal(predicate) to lend assistance in an emergency agency when other actuallyity are present than when they are al cardinal (Myers, 463). without the story, Allende uses voyeurism as a critical dramatic device as she connects Eva Luna to Rolf and Azucena. Through the interactions among the characters, Allende is fit to investigate how voyeurism can lead to social impassibility and act as a desensitizer in a crisis.Allendes And of Clay We Are Created describes how a innkeeper of reporters and cameramen become desensitized and apathetic towards Azucena as she is dying a pr flushtable death. The situation clearly characterizes the bystander effect. Studies by John Darley, a social psychologist at Princeton University, Allan I. Teger, and Lawrence D. Lewis, his colleagues, show this psychological phenomenon in the laboratory. The most common explanation of this phenomenon is that, the more hoi polloi present, the more likely the individual observer will pass absent the responsibility to service the victim, unfortunately believing that there is destined to be some nonpareil who is helping al hold or is going to help short (Darley, Lewis, and Teger 395). As more reporters arrive on the scene, each individual reporter get holds less obliged to actually, help the girl. Although in the story Allende does mention, Soldiers and volunteers had arrived to rescue the living, the lect urer is made aware that much of the rescue effort is ineffective and clunky (47).In this way, Allende poignantly criticizes the organization for non responding appropriately, when she insinuates out geologists had set up their seismographs weeks before and knew that the mountain had awakened again (47). She goes on to say that the geologists had predicted that the realityia of the eruption could detach the eternal ice from the slopes of the volcano, but no iodine cauti bingled their warnings (Allende 47). The immediate thought that strikes the lecturer is that this comp allowely ghastly episode could shoot been thwarted entirely if altogether the villagers had been either directly forewarned or compensate forced to relocate by the authorities. Interestingly, Allende searchs to point out that the villagers themselves did not heed the warnings of the geologists, perhaps to mitigate any doomed on the government and the media.Adding to the thwarting and ignorance, the lea ders of the government and military are unable and/or grudging to help secure a pump that could hand drained the bollocks water, which could move over effectively saved the little girls life. Although it is granted that Azucena is not the totally person in dire need of rescuing, the fact that she became the symbol of the disaster (47) while neer receiving help is really heartbreaking. Instead, the entire world mustiness come across the girl die a slow, agonizing death in front of the cameras. What makes the situation so horrifying is that this yett closely parallels an actual resultant that occurred in Columbia in 1985 (Picture power). A volcano had erupted (as in the story), and vomited debris and catalyzed mudslides that engulfed the towns airless the mountain. A photojournalist who proceeded to take her photograph, which made headlines through and throughout the world, lay down a 13-year-old girl. Many who saw the photographs were appalled how applied science had be en able to pick up her image for all time and transmit it around the globe, but was unable to save her life (Picture power). In fact, Allende seems to explicitly question the integrity and appraise of human technology as she describes how more television and movie teams arrived with spools of cable, tapes, film, videos, precision lenses, recorders, sounds consoles, lights, reflecting sieves, auxiliary motors, cartons of supplies, electricians, sound technicians, and cameramen, yet how they were not able to secure one life-saving pump (50). It is almost unbelievable how so much advanced technology and machines are brought to film the disaster as opposed to the amount of materials and supplies that are needed to help save the victims of the calamity. Allende is almost begging someone to help the girl as Rolf keeps pleading for a pump (50).Allende also masterfully foreshadows that the attempt to save Azucenas life will inevitably fail as she tells how anyone attempting to reach her was in danger of sinking themselves (48). When a rope is thrown to the girl, she tries to grab the rope, but ends up sinking deeper into the mud (Allende, 48). At this point, the reader must also ask whether Azucena actually wants to be saved. She must have been in the mud for some time now, and the pain and shock would have been eating away at her will to survive. In fact, when the rope is thrown at her, she makes no effort to catch the rope (Allende, 48). Has Allende doomed Azucena to death already? For a while, the reader is feedn little rays of hope that the girl will eventually be rescued and that there will be a happy ending, but in all honesty, most of the signs point toward certain death for the girl. Another attempt to rescue her by tie a rope beneath her arms is also thwarted when the girl cries out in pain from them pulling on the rope (Allende, 48). She is stuck in the mud and is only kept from being totally consumed by the mud when she is given a tire as a life sw im (Allende, 48).Allende skillfully blends fact and fiction, by creating her own stories from events that have transpired in the actually world. She creates characters that tell a gripping story, and become very believable. In the story, Rolf is a reporter who finds Azucena, the girl trapped in the mud and debris. Samuel Amago, a literary critic paternity in the Latin American Literary Review, asserts that Rolf tries to give Azucena the inspiration to live while the im individual(prenominal) television cameras look on without helping (54). He has become battle-tested through his work as Allende explains For years, he had been a familiar figure in newscasts, reporting live at the scene of battles and catastrophes with awesome tenacity. Nothing could stop himit seemed as if nothing could succuss his fortitude or deter his curiosity. Fear seemed never to touch him, although he was not a courageous man, far from it. (47)Through Azucenas struggle, he ends up undergoing a personal tran sformation by abandoning his aloof stance as a reporter that had served him so rise up in previous episodes, and by passionately embracing the girls fate personally.This is where voyeurism comes into play. This is not the kind of voyeurism confined only to the sexual fetish of receiving gratification from observing a sexual occurrence or object, but as Elizabeth Gough, a literary critic writing in the Journal of Modern Literature, states that it also includes any kind of intense, occult or distant gazing (93). Eva Luna is not physically present with Rolf and Azucena, but she is able to see everything that is occurring through the news. She is in a way, spying on the cardinal people. The intensity of her gazing is noticeable as the reader finds that Eva is arousedly, committed as she witnesses the events on television.The first aspect of voyeurism we find is the camera in the story. Rolf is a reporter and sees everything through a lens. Allende describes how the lens of the camer a had a strange effect on him it was as if it transported him to a different time from which he could watch events without actually participating in them (47-48). The mechanical tailoring of the cameras rolling as a human life is slowly failing portrays the media as impersonal, cold, and heartless. To Rolf, the camera lens acted like a desensitizer and promoted a sense of separation between Rolf and his surroundings so that while he was physically at the scene, his legal opinion was in another safe, secure place. Eva Luna realizes that for Rolf, the fictive distance between the lens and the real world seemed to protect him from his own emotions (321). Rolf had erected a psychological self-defense mechanism in response to his traumatic experiences as a young child. His trauma mostly stems from his guilt for not protecting his sister, Katharina, from their abusive father. Allende suggests that Rolf could not forgive himself for not saving his sister, but through his efforts to save Azucena- and through his subsequent emotional revelations- he could finally weep for her death and for the guilt of having abandoned her (328). Through this act of acceptance, Rolf finally realizes that all his life he had been taking base hit behind a lens to test whether reality was more decent from that perspective (Allende 328). Allende suggests that Rolfs voyeuristic approach to life had led to shallow achievement as a reporter, and weakened his ability to trust his own emotions as well as other valet de chambre. Why else did it take him so retentive to accept that Azucena was going to die? It was because he was too afraid to feel the pain of loss again, just like when he lost his sister. maven of the most memorable turning points in the story occurs when Azucena helps Rolf break down his emotional barriers and to come to terms with own past. Azucena accomplishes this not by communicativeise much, but by listening to Rolfs stories until he could not hold hold the unyiel ding floodgates that had contained Rolf Carles past (Allende, 327). In a classic reversal of roles, Azucena takes on the nurturing role of the heavy(p) during Rolfs weak and vulnerable moments. Allende portrays Rolfs grow as an uncaring, pivotal woman who would not give him emotional support or even to dry his tears (329). Azucena is the one who tells Rolf not to cry, something a traditional mother figure would have done (Allende 329).Voyeurism is also evident when Eva Luna, Rolfs lover, watches all that occurs in the news on television. The physical distance between Eva and Rolf is palpable, as Allende explains through Eva Many miles away, I watched Rolf Carle and the girl on a television screen (324). Nonetheless, through the story we are made aware that Eva and Rolf are intangibly bound together. The reader is leave in the similar plight of Eva we see earthy disasters and tragedy through the eyes of the media. Therefore, in a sense, the media helps desensitize humans to real tragedies that occur by providing a fictive, safe distance for its viewers. This is just now the reason why actually experiencing something can leave a truly lasting impression whereas seeing something on television can seem obscure and impartial.However, in the story, this fictive distance actually fuels the reality of what is natural event at the disaster scene to Eva. For Eva, it is as if she is physically present at the disaster with Rolf and Azucena. The images on the television help her visualize what Rolf is seeing and even thinking at each precise moment, time of sidereal day by hour (Allende 326). It is indeed surprising and remarkable how Allende portrays the attachment of Eva to Rolf even though Eva is exceptional to the impersonal medium of television to keep in touch with her lover. Allende explains that Eva was near Rolfs world and she could at least get a feeling of what he lived through (324). She further clarifies that while the screen reduced the disaster to a single plane and accentuated the tremendous distance that separated Eva from Rolf Carle nonetheless, she was there with him (324). Eva and Rolf were connected in mind as well, as Eva was able to overhear the verbal ex varietys between Rolf and Azucena to the point where she was present with them (Allende 326). Although it can be argued that Eva is much more personally connected and involved than the general reader is to the situation at the site of the catastrophe, the reader is drawn into the conflict and struggle by the personal narrative of Eva. The reader is told the story through Evas perspective, and thus we are left with an impression that is comparable to the storyteller. The voyeurism goes many ways.Compounding this idea of long-distance interconnectedness is how Allende ties Eva to Azucena, in addition to Rolf. Through Rolfs interplay with Azucena, Eva is hurt by the girls every suffering, and feels Rolfs licking and impotence (Allende 324). The three are enjoined toget her in a quaint love triangle. Rolf tells Azucena that he loves her more than he loved his mother, more than his sister, more than all the women who had slept in his arms, more than he loved Eva, his life blighter (Allende 330). Of course, he does not mean Eros love, the kind between adult men and women, but a more intrinsically human one of neighborly love and goodwill. Eva, in her turn, expresses her love for Rolf and Azucena when she admits that she would have given anything to be trapped in that well in her place, and would have exchanged her life for Azucenas (Allende 330). We are then forced to analyze whether the voyeuristic qualities of the media affects the different types of love shown in the story. For the most part, the media helps Eva to express stronger love for Rolf and to become connected to Azucena, whom she had never met. Without the media, Eva would never have known what had happened at the disaster as well as the identity of the little girl who had tremendously affected Rolf. For Rolf, his initial voyeurism through the lens of the camera had acted as a desensitizer and emotional barricade, and when face up with the crisis, his love for Azucena is bolstered as he comes to realize he must let go of his past and obligingly accept the situation. However, Rolfs love for Eva seems to have taken a hit after he returns from his ordeal (Allende 331).A acidulated question one is forced to ask is what or who exactly Allende is blaming in her story, or if she is even blaming someone or something in particular for Azucenas death. While it is clear that Rolf definitely undergoes a psychological metamorphosis, we cannot logically assume that this change is for the better. The end of the story suggests that Rolf will never be the same man again, but that he will eventually heal (Allende 331). Eva hopes that one day when Rolf returns from his nightmares, they shall be the happy couple they used to be (Allende 331). However, the ending suggests that for Rolf, the incident was as traumatic as his initial trauma as a child. Rolf is not free from his past, as Eva would like him to be. In fact, although he is freed from his childishness trauma, he is still haunted by his failure to save Azucena. maybe Allende is suggesting that emotional healing can only occur when the victim is ready to be healed.Then is Allende blaming the media for Azucenas death? Alternatively, is she pointing out the gross inability of the government to intervene swiftly and to protect its citizens? Probably, a bit of both. The media is clearly represent in a heartless, cold manner. Why did anyone not helped? Nevertheless, if any one thing is to be blamed, it should be the society where this incident occurred. Allende seems to be ambitious the ineptitude and unpreparedness of the government and its leaders for not mustering the resources and courage to save the girl. The villagers are also criticized as unheeding fools who only brought the calamity upon thems elves by not listening to the geologists. This makes it hard to blame anyone at all. Perhaps Allende is suggesting that it is unnecessary to blame anyone, but rather to calmly accept what happened, just as Azucena does in the end. One thing is though that Allende does not approve of the social apathy that permeates throughout the story, and claims that it was the unwillingness to help that ultimately kills Azucena. This makes us wonder, just how hazardous it can be to remain a bystander, instead of actively assisting those who need our help.ReferenceAmago, Samuel. Isabel Allende and the postmodern literary tradition A reconsideration of Cuentos de Eva Luna. Latin American Literary Review 28.56 (Jul-Dec 2000) 43-61.Darley, John M., Allan I. Teger, and Lawrence D. Lewis. Do Groups Always get over Individuals Responses To Potential Emergencies? Journal of Personality and Social psychology 26.3 (1973) 395-399.Gough, Elizabeth (2004). Vision and divergence Voyeurism in the Works of I sabel Allende.Journal of Modern Literature,27(4),93-120. Retrieved May 2, 2010, from Research Library. (Document ID801683111).Myers, David G. (2010). Social Psychology (10th Ed.). Boston McGraw-HillPicture power Tragedy of Omayra Sanchez. BBC News 30 Sept. 2005. Retrieved April 17, 2010 from http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4231020.stm.Rubenstein, R. Larson, C. (2002). Worlds of fiction (2nd Ed.). Isabel Allende, And of Clay Are We Created, 46-52. Upper weight River Prentice Hall