The Lightning Thief Versions of Reality

From the beginning of this story, we readers are involved in and made away of the versions of reality that are at play. Here, Percy tells us that there are different ways we can interpret and understand this story. We can be like all of those humans along the way who interpret Percy's run-in with gods and monsters as the work of a "troubled" kid with serious issues. Or we can choose to believe that what we are telling us is true. It's almost as though he's saying, "OK, readers, you can either be really narrow-minded, or you can open your eyes and really see what's going on here." It's like reverse-psychology too, because of course we want to see what's really going on. So, Percy almost helps us become believers in the gods.

Why do Mr. Brunner and Grover wait so long to tell Percy that he is a half-blood? It seems kind of cruel to let him believe that his mind is playing tricks on him, making him think that he hallucinated Mrs. Dobbs and killing Mrs. Dobbs. Once Percy gets to Camp Half-Blood, they don't waste any time telling him he needs to open up his mind and understand that, just because humans see things one way doesn't mean there aren't other ways of seeing them. For a kid who has been made to believe that he hallucinates things like Mrs. Dobbs and one-eyed men in trench coats, it's no wonder it takes him a while to get used to being a demi-god.

Smelly Gabe certainly has different versions of reality. He blames Percy for everything, even for things he didn't do. In this case, Smelly Gabe interrupts his own poker game to make Percy give him money. Gabe rewrites history, so to speak. So, who is to say that mortals don't have different versions of reality? Are there any other examples of moments when mortals rewrite history in a similar way?

Sometimes Percy is too distracted by things (scary things) going on around him to realize that he already exists in another version of reality. He doesn't notice things like the fact that he can understand Ancient Greek at first. The poor guy has been labeled as "troubled" all his life for noticing abnormal events and occurrences, and he has to learn how to actively look for and seek out these events and occurrences really quickly.

Dreams are super-important in The Lightning Thief. Here, Percy dreams of Poseidon's symbol (the horse) and Zeus's symbol (the eagle) fighting, helping him to understand what exactly is going on over on Mount Olympus. While the dream is just a dream, and the horse and eagle are just symbols, we know that they are telling Percy something important about things going on right now on Mount Olympus. The dream world seems to be another version of reality in this novel.

Imagine being a kid who sees unordinary things all the time, but never having people believe you when you tell them what you've seen. That's enough to make a person good and loopy, and it's also enough to make a person really lonely. Sometimes seeing things a different way means being excluded from a group or community that you belong to.

How confusing it must be for Percy to be a demi-god who doesn't know he's a demi-god. Especially when his innate powers can't help but show themselves from time to time (like when Clarisse ends up in the fountain in the front of the NYC museum). Compare the way Chiron and Grover handle Percy's knowing about his godlike powers to the way Dumbledore and Hagrid help Harry Potter understand that he is a wizard in The Harry Potter series.

It's funny that the mortal world chooses to see Percy as a fugitive and only later changes their minds. The fact that Barbara Walters reports on Percy shows us that he is national news, a subject of national concern. He's big news. What does the fact that humans choose to see Percy as a fugitive from the beginning tell us about humans and how they see the world? Could you say that Smelly Gabe creates his own "Mist" that he throws over the eyes of America?

Perhaps demi-gods like Percy have the toughest job. They have to exist in both the mortal and non-mortal world, and they have to understand the way in which their actions might be interpreted (in two very different ways) by both mortals and humans. That's enough to stress a person out!

Even when they get to the Underworld, Percy still seems to have a hard time understanding that humans understand things in different ways. Grover calls Percy "stubborn," but we have to remember that Percy has only known that he is a half-blood for two weeks. Cut the guy some slack!