Many Characters in The Wasp Factory Seek to Exert Control over Themselves, Others and the Environment. What does Iain Banks have to Say about the Idea of Control in the Novel?

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Many Characters in The Wasp Factory Seek to Exert Control over Themselves, Others and the Environment. What does Iain Banks have to Say about the Idea of Control in the Novel?

        Throughout the whole novel of the Wasp Factory, the story is based around a recurring theme of control and whether it’s through Frank his Dad or a higher power intervening, control or lack of it is the key element to Frank’s personality. Anger, ambition and his dad control him while he controls everything he can, even making his own death factory for wasps trespassing on his island as a hierarchy of “God complexes” take shape. Yet can he even stay in control of himself? it turns out no, but can anyone? Iain Banks leaves the reader pondering some very interesting questions about the extent to which we control our own lives or we all just God’s own wasps in a factory where are actions are dominated by other people’s choices.

        At the very beginning of the book, Banks draws our attention to the differences of the Cauldhame; their isolation from society and the strange way in which their family goes about their days. The first scene we get of Frank is of him fixing up a sign warning off “intruders” saying that the island their house is on is “private property”. The reader immediately gets a first and lasting impression of Frank’s unusual aggression and control hungry personality. And in case the sign wasn’t enough, we then see him progress to his “sacrifice poles;” believing in the power of the dead protecting his territory, we soon hear a description of one of these poles and it’s is the first time we really see to what an extent Frank is prepared to go to control. One of the poles “bears a rat’s head and two dragonflies, the other a seagull and two mice. Both of these “sacrifices” consist of one larger animal and two smaller, an image that could be seen as resembling a set of male genitals, a key to a man’s something Frank is in fact never in control or even sure about. This episode shows Frank trying to control, but the result of his actions representing something that he can’t (control), a cycle which recurs later in the book with the kite episode.

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        Frank was so skilled at flying kites always in control of them just like he tries to control everything else. But one day he decides to kill yet another family member, without even thinking about what he was actually doing. Having killed two of his male relatives as a child himself, his motive for killing “poor little Esmerelda,” a cousin whom he confessed he liked, was simply to even out the balance of men to women in the world. Here Banks shows the reader the clash of Frank’s personalities; such a complex mind, doing things others wouldn’t dare, yet such ...

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