Immortality through the Oasis

The idea of immortality through literature discusses the ability of an author to transcend the constraints of time through their writing. It maintains that an author’s ideas can live on and affect future minds, even though his time on earth has ended. In Ready Player One, James Halliday succeeds at a similar type of eternal life, but his legacy lives on because of a virtual reality rather than written word.

The allusions in the novel to people, events, and great works serve as a reminder that the tangible cannot be bound by time. Throughout his journey, Wade doesn’t witness major cultural and historical references, he experiences them. When he unlocks the first and second gates, he quickly finds himself in the midst 80s TV shows and video games shows, either physically acting or physically fighting his way to victory. As Wade competes in these challenges, he essentially experiences moments in history for a second time. When other grunters pass through the same gate, they essentially experience history for a third, fourth, fifth time and so on. The 80s remarkably is able to transcend the constraints of time and permeate the mind of future minds. As a result, immortality of an entire generation becomes a central theme of the novel and the reader is forced to consider the legitimacy of this type of eternal life.

            Towards the end of the novel James Halliday comments on this type of eternal life and asserts that time and reality can never really be manipulated. He admits that he adopted the virtual world in Oasis as his reality, but he realized it was a grave mistake because reality is “the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real” (Cline 364). This understanding of the differences between virtual reality and reality essentially admits that reality can never be reconstructed and therefore true immortality will always be impossible. Even though Halliday attempts to play God in his creation of an entire world, he is ultimately unsuccessful because mankind will always be limited by their physicality and temporality.