The Filth

When I first started reading The Filth I was not sure what I thought of it. But as I continued to read I noticed that it brings up a lot of good issues about the world today. In the first book issue you have Greg Feely, a pathetic and lonely man whose only love in life is his cat, who eats junk food and masturbates in front of the TV. But when he has sex his parapersona escapes out of him and he becomes this ass kicking officer of a secret organization. I think this is making a statement about society and sex and how living a life of solitude is not accepted and you are only someone if you have sex. Throughout the novel they make several reinforcements to this idea.

Another thing this novel does is break the fourth wall boundary. Throughout the novel they make comments about leaping from the page and about being able to see their own talk bubbles. In the third issue you have "the villains" literally flying off the page wall and into a different world, yet when the "super hero" tries to follow he splats against the page wall. They also make the comment that since they were "on the page" everything he said was converted into word bubbles. And later in the issue you see the super hero who discovered how to break that fourth wall and goes into this oversphere he discovers. But once he leaves the world on the pages he is weak, and all he can do is look back onto the page and continuously watch himself make the same mistake over and over again. He also discovers alternative versions of his story, which makes me think of our lives and how every decision we makes brakes us off onto a new path. And how there are millions of different outcomes to our lives, but unlike the characters in the novel, we get to chose our own path, it is not chosen for us, or we would hope so anyway.

In this novel they mention that we are all angels, but we are just waited down by our filth. I thought that this was a really interesting way to think of it, because its true. When we are born we are pure and innocent, but as we grow and live our lives we become engrossed in hypothetical layers of filth. And with each sin we commit that filth gets heavier and heavier, but with each good deed we get to wash a little of that filth off. And by the time we die we hope that the filth isn't heavy enough to weigh our souls down and drag us to hell, but that the amount of good we did in this world is enough to lift us up to heaven, or whichever afterlife you believe in.

One more good point I thought this novel made was a person's battle with identity. I feel like everyone experiences this, although usually when they are younger such as in high school and college, and not so much when they are older like Greg Feely, but it does happen none the less. In this novel he battles with his boring but normal life of masturbation and taking care of his cat as Greg Feely, versus his exciting yet bizarre life as officer Slade. And although he seems to much prefer his simple life better, in the end he can't get away from who he really is. I think this represents our world pretty well. Although we may want to be someone else, in the end we are who we are and there isn't really anything you can do to change it. Not yet anyway...