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A classic form of art, be it music, fine art, or literature has an enduring quality that stands the test of time. The litmus test shows Dracula is of written genius it is fresh in today's application on the conscience and sleeping conscience readers, as it had in 1897.
Abraham Bram Stoker has created a hero, or a coward, or leaves the unawakened sleep walking through this story.
The hero is the critical thinker, the reader who can see how evil behaviour is the result of victimization. First the Count and his detached and aristocracy parenting that produced an anti-social sociopath, and the victim being drawn in for the 'feeding' by he / those in society that would suck out the lifeblood or milk of human kindness from the unwary.
The hero in the story is the reader who ascertains the truth of fact vs. fiction, and run to the truth with his heart and mind.
The coward on the other hand is one who reads this story and uses his metaphoric feet and legs to distance himself from the novels truth because it is too difficult to see the Count as every man that would prey on the avails of women for sexual and possessivness objectivity rather than subjectivity of holding an equal to love.
There is the unawakened who like Harker either slowly comes to recognize there is something not right with all the clues of cruelty around him, and then again there are those who accept the misogyny as norm.
Count Dracula is a victim as well as a perpetrator. He has no skills to earn respect for goodwill and merit. But he earns fear mongering that creates an illusion of power.
The foil, or the story telling the story is an overlay of allegory in the sense that religious and spiritual context play into consciences choices. "You can move around the castle freely, but you must not enter the door which is locked".
You can go freely around the garden and eat of every tree of the garden, but do not eat of the tree of good and evil.
The tree of knowledge and life are the same and different. To have knowledge is a limited gain and mortality, and to have life is infinite and immortal.
Bram Stoker's Dracula asks the reader to choose in the choice to pick the doors we enter, to choose the accountability and responsibility that comes with the knowledge we bring into our life.
It asks us to dwell and ponder upon the question of life after death, and life in life.
What is the quality of life if it's value is seen as less by one and equal by another. This equation is a formula for disaster. Those that deem themselves more deserving usurp by their gain and their neighbours loss.
When the evil realizes their actions are only backward to the Law of Nature... which is the Law of Love's Golden Proportion balancing in simple elegance the rape of the innocent will end.
For that to happen the evil have to be mirrored by their own evil by some method. Then and only then will they 'understand'... then and only then will they draw upon their own empathy and own compassion to feel what it is like to have it done on themselves.
But it must be done with the forgiveness to learn and the acceptance to know, the Cruel many times are sleepers too, the unaware who they really are, and "they don't know what they're doing". These were the words of the Christ Consciousness in Jesus Ben Nun who understands both sides of the cruelty fence. The victimized and the persecuted, the accepter and the forgiver.
To carry on as a society it is finding the way to condemn the sin and not the sinner. They, like the Count had no upbringing to engender the do onto others heart. He was a kindred outcast.
Even when he was to go the Colfax Estate in England he wanted... craved respect. But what he thought was respect from his townspeople was fear and loathing.
He was a hollow man inside wanted to be filled by the warmth and kindness of the good heart. But the only way he knew how to do this was to entrap the unsuspecting and agendasize them to his wiles.
This book was motivated by a deep desire on the writer to know the state of soul after death. After a suicide, like the wife of Dracula which left him heartbroken, bitter and abandoned... the writer digs the depth of earthly and conscience innate plunking to surface the enlightenment to the darkest of questions.
In the end the light of day wins. Mina sees the darkest of spirits to walk the earth, on death find a place where serenity and peace are found in a belonging that exists for all.
Stoker finds the treasure ~ The Blue Light that illuminates the journey's process on earth and back to the beginning of an end that continues forever.
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