The Man in the Grey Suit in the Night Circus

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Jamisen Beechler-Ernst 9/30/13 The Night Circus Crocco The man in the grey suit appears in The Night Circus as a philosophical voice in order to create questions in our mind. In many books that are read the reader is expected to merely take the written word as fact and not to question it. The man in the grey suit assists us in question what has been previously established. In the passage of The Night Circus during which the man in the grey suit states that the magic we see in circuses and shows “is not magic” and is “the way the world is.” In this he is saying that magic isn’t merely “clever deception” of the audience but the natural occurrences in the world. He leads us to question the possible magic acts that are performed in the world. This questioning may bring one to draw the conclusion that he means towering snow-peaked mountains while bathers lounge on the sand below, or the crashing waterfalls mere miles downstream from a calm stream. One might also think of sunsets that appear to have been painted on the sky by a giant paintbrush. The most painstaking conclusion we may have come to is how much magic, if any, is involved in the creation of a human and how each humans’ life is affected by it. To the man in the grey suit these may be acts of pure magic but why do many of us not see them as such? According the man people seem incredibly naïve, that “Not a one of them even has an inkling of the things that are possible in this world…” He continues to insinuate that we are ignorant, that “none of them would listen if you attempted to enlighten them.” In this statement the man in the grey suit challenges the reader to question why they do not believe magic is anything more than “clever deception.” The answer the man gives is that people “want to believe that magic is nothing but clever deception, because to think it real would keep them up at
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