Islands and Slippers and Beer. Oh my!

If you were stranded on a deserted island what would you take with you?

You can choose anything. It's a difficult question to answer, mostly because in today's society anything you could wish for is only a mouse click away.

What gives us meaning and happiness is no longer an indefinable thing like family, friends or success. We can now look through a catalog and say “There! That is the thing that will make me happy.” In most cases we are told exactly which products will make us happy. The problem is: “things” can't actually give us meaning or happiness. Nobody has looked down at their brand new iPhone and sighed the sigh of someone who is completely fulfilled.

In “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” Salmon Rushdie explores the “moral decay of our post-millennial culture.”(94). Like the title suggests, it is a story about the auction of the famous “ruby slippers” worn by Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz”. The story is set in a future where everything has a price. It is a world where life has been “packaged into lots” that go to the highest bidder. Ironically, the most highly prized and anticipated lot, offers an escape from the present condition.

Rushdie's story, can be interpreted a number of different ways and on many levels. An aspect I find interesting is the choice to focus on the ruby slippers as the most sought after item in the auction. In the movie, the ruby slippers represent a way “home”. “Home” in the story, is “a lost state of normalcy in which we have almost ceased to believe and to which the slippers promise us we can return” (92). The slippers are so highly prized because they are the one “thing” that when pointed out in a catalog actually can provide the happiness we've been searching for.

Rushdie's vision of the future is dramatized in a way that highlights what our present society has become. We are no longer people, with hopes and dreams; we are consumers that clamor for a chance to regain our humanity. The vast amount of bidders vying for a chance at the ruby slippers is analogous to present society's wanton desire to buy happiness. Unfortunately, only one person can buy themselves a ticket home. The main character in the story comes very close to winning the ruby slippers. He becomes “detached from earth” and his goal of the perfect life with his beloved becomes fictional. This “fictional life”is what we are sold everyday. Advertisers tell us that their product is the pathway to happiness. But, as Rushdie tells us, we have a choice. We can give in to the fictional story and believe everything the Advertisers and Auctioneers tell us, or “in that miasmal ocean, we may simply float away from our desires, and see them anew, from a distance, so that they seem weightless, trivial. We let them go.”

So, what would you take with you to a deserted island?