Selective Obliviousness / Literature

• This is the cornerstone of Nineteen Eighty-Four's Doublethink. Bonus points for the requirements that obliviousness must not only be selective but also A) instantly switchable, as in you must completely and sincerely forget whatever you vehemently believed in a moment ago and, if necessary, switch back the next moment; and B) recursive, as in you must forget that you've just forgotten something, forget having forgotten that, et cetera.
  The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.
  He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions — 'the Party says the earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than water' — and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them.
  Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
• The Butcher Boy: Francie pretends not to notice how dysfunctional his parents are. Later he just can’t accept that his father has died because of his alcoholism and goes out of his way to convince himself that he is just sleeping a lot because he's drunk, and that the foul smell everybody complains about (and which he pretends not to notice) must be from a dead animal.
• In The City & the City by China Miéville, two European cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, exist on the same spot at the same time, interwoven with each other. Citizens of one city are trained from a young age to "unsee" the other city and its citizens, under dire penalty from a peacekeeping force known as the Breachers.
• Discworld:
  • Twoflower is besotted with the idea of Rincewind as a Great Wizzard (sic), and refuses to realize that he's completely incapable of doing magic. This is far more prominent in Interesting Times, though, as he does seem to exhibit something approaching realization in The Colour of Magic.
  • The Duck Man refuses to realize that he has a duck on his head, regardless of how many people tell him so in no uncertain terms.
  • Lord Rust is well known for, as the author puts it, "Erasing unwelcome sights and sounds from his personal universe". This causes problems for him when people like Detritus and the Dean of Unseen University are apparently too large to erase, and Hilarity when Vimes takes advantage of it to swear at him without him noticing. This appears to have at least some effect on reality; for instance, he's so confident that a Gentleman isn't in any real danger on the battlefield that arrows will arc around him and hit someone else.
  • In Making Money, Mr Bent prides himself on his impeccable perception and eye for detail (he can spot a miscalculation with just a glance from across the room) but is oblivious to a female coworker's open infatuation with him. Presumably it's not so much self-denial as it is an inability to expect anyone to have those feelings for him.
  • Nanny Ogg will never see her cat Greebo as anything other than a sweet little kitten, as opposed to the one-eyed, battle-scarred multiple rapist that everyone else knows and fears.
  • Monstrous Regiment: Lieutenant Blouse has the "officer's ability to erase unwanted sights and sounds from existence". In this case, it's Igor volunteering to be his batman, so he goes with Polly (who did not volunteer at all) instead.
• The Doctor Who New Adventures novel Death and Diplomacy had the Doctor respond to a blatant come-on by a female villain by saying he made a point of being entirely oblivious to such things or getting them noticeably wrong, because it saved a lot of trouble.
• Dialogue in the The Dresden Files implies that Harry is aware of Molly's feelings for him, but chooses to ignore them and cuts out the parts of his narration that mention them. (This doesn't count as Oblivious to Love, by the way - he acknowledges Molly's feelings when she becomes his apprentice, attributing them to trauma, then goes on to ignore them.)
• Foreign Affairs: Virginia aka "Vinnie" is a professor doing a study of children's rhymes. A little girl approaches Vinnie and starts reciting racist, obscene rhymes. Vinnie is not only personally uncomfortable, as she is a quite prim and starchy woman, she also realizes that the girl's rhymes undermine her thesis. So she decides to forget them.
• Harry Potter:
  • The Ministry of Magic chooses not to believe that Voldemort is back in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix despite the overwhelming evidence. They lead the public to believe that all is well and constantly berate Harry and Dumbledore as liars. It's explained that they have a contrived denial caused from how horrible Voldemort's previous reign of terror was. It was explained by the protagonists that the Ministry suspected Dumbledore of using Voldemort as a scapegoat to explain his own screw-ups at running the school. The Minister of Magic Fudge, on the other hand, believes that Dumbledore is trying to usurp him as Minister of Magic. It came back to bite them in the butt when Fudge got kicked out of office and public opinion of the Ministry plummets when it was discovered that Dumbledore and Harry were right.
  • In Book 4, it's briefly mentioned that Petunia, who could spot the tiniest imperfections that could be used for gossip fodder, refused to see that Dudley's obesity had reached dangerous levels (in the book he's compared to a young killer whale). She only sees reason after Dudley's school nurse sends her a letter about it since the school doesn't stock uniforms in Dudley's size.
  • Hermione refuses to listen to anyone who tells her that House Elves have different values than humans and enjoy serving wizards more than freedom (and that's including the House Elves themselves).
  • Snape refuses to see Harry as anything other than an egotistical rule-breaking show-off, in spite of any and all evidence, such as basic observation of Harry's behaviour might produce (okay, the "rule-breaking" part is kind of true, admittedly). That this is also his view of Harry's father, who bullied Snape when they were at school, has a lot to do with this - Snape just sees James Potter whenever he looks at Harry. And Snape refused to see James' better parts as well.
• Heralds of Valdemar: The residents of Valdemar have a magically-induced blind spot when it comes to the existence of magic and the true nature of their Companions. For example, the scholars of Valdemar insist that the ballad of Kerowyn's ride, an account of more or less contemporary events, is meant to be interpreted metaphorically even after the real Kerowyn shows up in Valdemar and becomes one of the Queen's best-known advisors.
• In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (at least the novels), Zaphod is literally selectively aware of his own motives, due to having both of his brains surgically altered so that certain thoughts wouldn't be detectable by the brain scans he needed to undergo in order to become President of the Galaxy.
  • This is also in the movie. It's more of a Hand Wave of Zaphod's two heads because they don't go into specifics.
  • The basis for the Applied Phlebotinum of the S.E.P. field. Making something invisible is incredibly difficult and requires massive power; a S.E.P. field is easy to make and can be run off a single battery. People can see things under a S.E.P. field, but they don't notice them, because whatever it is, it's Somebody Else's Problem.
  • Mostly Harmless features a species of bird that is oblivious to every strange thing that happens, like ignoring a fiery spaceship crash. However, they are always shocked by perfectly mundane things. For example, "...And sunrise always took them completely by surprise."
    • Their train of logic is that an unusual thing only happens once, so it's not worth noticing, as it'll probably not affect them. On the other hand, something that happens every day will affect them, so it's worth noticing.
• In Stephen King's IT, the entire town of Derry is afflicted with this, because IT is subtly manipulating them into complacency until IT chooses a scapegoat for them to slaughter. Practically all of Derry sees Beverly being abused by various people and none of them help, one man even calmly going back into his house rather than even scold her harassers. At one point, a man walks into a bar and dismembers a group of men playing cards with an axe. The rest of the patrons don't so much as ask him to leave... but when it's all said and done, they personally storm into the police station, nab him, and lynch him.
• In The King's Avatar, despite all the evidence that says otherwise (knowing Ye Xiu is a retired professional player, having played Glory for ten years, is exceptionally skilled and knowledgeable about the game and Ye Xiu flat out telling her who he really is), Chen Guo simply does not realize that her newest employee is the infamous Ye Qiu.
• Clifford manages to be shocked when he finally learns that his wife has been having an affair with another man in Lady Chatterley's Lover. His maid recognizes that he subconsciously knew about his wife's infidelity from the start, but just didn't have the courage to face it.
• In the Hercule Poirot novel The Murder on the Links, it is noted that Poirot's rival investigator, Detective Giraud, is so focused on his own perspective and ideas that he ignores certain key evidence that doesn't fit his theory that the murder victim was killed by his son, Jack Renauld, in order to secure his inheritance. However, Giraud's theory doesn't explain a piece of lead piping found by the body (which was (intended to disfigure the originally-planned fake corpse after death to hide its true identity). His theory also fails to properly explain why, if Jack Renauld killed his father for his inheritance, he would have bothered trying to bury the body afterwards; obviously he wanted the body found swiftly so that he could claim the inheritance, which meant that trying to hide it would be stupid at best.
• Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey is such a Gothic novel fan she tries to read the plot of one into her stay at the Abbey and the late Mrs. Tilney's death, imagining a terrible and sad murder story. But she casts herself as the heroine, while completely missing that Eleanor Tilney hits all the notes of a classic Gothic heroine: dead mother, overbearing father, living in effective isolation, and with a secret forbidden love.
• A short story "Perfectly Adjusted" by Gordon R. Dickson has a space traveler land on a planet. He encounters a village with two populations, where persons of one population are oblivious to anyone in the other. They dress very differently, so the main character can distinguish between the two. Representatives of both populations see him because his dress is ambiguous. There is at least one hint that the obliviousness is pretended: Children sometimes interact with children from the opposite population. Parents often find an excuse to spank those children. The main character resolves the issue by turning on a ray that causes everyone's clothes to melt.
• Part of what makes Molly a Base-Breaking Character is because of this trope in the Realm of the Elderlings Farseer Trilogy, where she constantly gets angry with Fitz and accuses him of toying with her when he tries to explain to her multiple times that the reason they have to keep their relationship secret and why he can't spend all his time with her is because of his position at court, since he's secretly an assassin for King Shrewd (something he is forbidden to tell anyone about—even Burrich doesn't know). Molly continues to refuse to believe he is being honest about the precariousness of his position or how much danger she would be in, even when she's almost assaulted by two armed men on horseback because of her association with Fitz.
• In The Secret History, Julian knows every important part of the plot, except for the crucial fact that five of his students killed the sixth one. He wants to believe the best of them, but really, it's not a huge leap to make...
• In the Jin Yong novel Smiling Proud Wanderer Linghu Chong, despite usually being quite perceptive and it becoming glaringly obvious, cannot grasp that his master is a scheming coward who doesn't care one bit for either Linghu Chong or any other of his pupils.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Tywin Lannister is a frighteningly intelligent lord and Hand of the King. He's smart, relentless, brutal and utterly competent — except when it comes to his family, especially his dwarf son Tyrion. Tywin is so appalled by Tyrion's dwarfism — and so angry that his beloved wife died giving birth to Tyrion — he can't recognize Tyrion's worth and the essential fact that his hated son actually has all of his father's intelligence and cunning.
• Johnnie Rico in Starship Troopers. While he tries hard to paint himself as "just another ape", reading between the lines shows he's pegged as leadership material almost from the start. This comes to a head when he tells his brevet Platoon Leader that he wants to enroll in Officer Candidate School. He's shocked when the man pulls out the necessary paperwork, already filled out, requiring only Johnnie's signature.
• Early on in Quill's Window, Courtney Thane's mother writes to him that she genuinely has no idea why his father cut him out of the will right before he died, and Courtney's sentiment seems to be the same. When we find out the reason for this later in the book, it becomes quite obvious that if either of them had engaged in serious self-reflection they would know the reason behind the father's I Have No Son! moment.
• The Wheel of Time: One of Mat Cauthon's defining characteristics.
  • Born the son of a horse trader in a backwards village, he identifies himself as a simple man who rolls his eyes at the nobles he encounters, only good for gambling with and stealing their coins. Despite that, he throughout the series gains military command, political intrigue, and a taste for fine clothing and drink. It's almost parody when, late in the series, he ends up marrying a foreign princess and him insisting that "just because he married a princess, that didn't mean that he was a bloody noble" with his friends pointing out that not only did that make him a nobleman, it is the very definition of being made nobility.
  • He rescued the young orphan Olver from being whipped after messing with one of his lieutenant's horses. After a couple of failed efforts to unload him at an orphanage, he ended up hiring him to take care of his horse and ended up spending his nights with him, playing games with him; and teaching him about the world. After about half a book of this, his men started to treat Olver as Mat’s De-facto son, something that greatly confused Mat. He was also annoyed that Olver started to pick up some Casanova Wannabe tendencies and cursing, wondering who in the band had corrupted him, with everyone, the reader included, noting that Olver acted as a carbon-copy of Mat himself.
  • He feels nothing but naked contempt for the Dragon-sworn, "those fool men who blindly follow every Word their precious Lord Dragon tells them" while A) technically being the leader of a band of such men and B) Unwaveringly doing whatever his best friend Rand asks him to do (although bitching and cursing every step of the way). His best friend Rand Al'Thor — The Dragon Reborn.
  I'm here because Rand needs me! I will never understand what their excuses are!
• X-Wing Series: Wedge at one point comments about how the Bothans are very proud of the fact their intelligence work and sacrifices were what allowed the Rebel Alliance to learn the location of the Death Star II, and they use that to secure a great deal of authority and influence in the New Republic. The problem? They're ignoring the fact that Palpatine let them get that information as part of a plan to destroy the Alliance, which very nearly worked.

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