Since the novel is based on the author's real-life experience, Coelho questioned himself in the third chapter: How do I put these information in the right way? As in, properly?

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. - Robert A. Heinlein, author of Stranger in a Strange Land

Coelho does not wish to label this other Veronika as "Veronika the lunatic", which no doubt anyone would say is pretty rude. Really; since when do individuals have the right to put a label on one another? Unless it's under a totalitarian government, like a Big Brother world of 1984, individual existence remains unique to their own will.

Coelho considered changing the main character's name, thinking ahead for possible future publicity issues that may come with the real-life Veronika, but he ended up using the real one. Also, he had another friend called Veronika who showed up only briefly at this point of the book, only expressing her sympathy for the so-called "lunatic" people. This other friend is also the daughter of the doctor-in-charge of the asylum where they kept the Veronika, our main character. Upon hearing Veronika's treatment in the asylum, she replied by explaining to the reader that the word 'asylum' comes from the Middle Ages,  from a person's right to seek refuge in churches and other holy places. The right to asylum is something any civilized person can understand. And as we've learned from my previous post, obviously, the nurse didn't realize that Veronika, a patient under treatment in the asylum and socially-labelled as "insane", actually have the right to make a decision to die, especially when she does not suffer from any degree of mental disorders. She is just that: A perfectly healthy woman who decided to die and had the individual right to do so.

Placing labels on individuals are essential in identity politics. Yet all foreigners in a foreign land would recognize the feeling of being ostracized - You come from somewhere faraway, but they know you are still on the same globe. But they focus on your faraway factor. In an increasingly Big Brotherly world, stepping in to this new land with new people, you are "supposed" to bring to the table the place where you come from, leaving little room for the expression of the self, which always have the right to roam elsewhere, anywhere. To illustrate Veronika's resentment letter about Slovenia, here's a great talk about the struggles of a Turkish fiction writer who's "labelled" as the faraway lands of Turkey.





Part of why Coelho decided to write this novel was not only because for the love of writing (not because he's "just doing his job"), but mainly for those artistic expressions that can manifest itself through the act of writing. Any writer knows what to tell in order to tell the story best, and what needs not. He wanted to share to the reader his past experiences surrounded in such mental institutes, as he was kept in an asylum, too, thrice in his life - and vowed never to go back again. He made a decision to "touch publicly on the issue", that is, writing about it, after his parents are dead, just so he will not worry about them getting hurt. As the art of writing involves a lot of situation-manipulation, he found that writing Veronika's personal story also coincides with his personal promise to write about his being committed to mental hospitals, of reasons which he still found pretty odd. Part of the desire to write is to tell his own story, and the other part is simply disclosing the knowledge he learned from this magnificent, character-driven true story.

I feel that I'm telling Saluna's journalistic story for the same reasons. To be continued...