In “The Remarkable Rocket,” Wilde warns against the effects of a wildly inflated ego. The eponymous Rocket, who has been set up to honor a royal wedding, believes himself to be the most important and admirable individual who has ever lived. Though he fails to perform as a firework should, the Rocket entertains a series of delusions that allow him to maintain his belief in his own grandeur. However, he is not alone in this. The other chief characters in the story—the King and the Frog—are similarly obsessed with their own sense of self-importance, which causes each of them to live in a delusional subjective reality. These arrogant delusions prevent the Rocket, the King, and the Frog from seeing reality the way that it truly is.
The King, the Rocket, and the Frog each consider themselves to be the most interesting and compelling people in the world. The King wrongly believes himself to be a talented flute player—though his Courtiers know otherwise and simply refuse to tell him so—and a wise counsel, constantly answering questions that were asked of other people in the assumption that anyone would like to be graced by his intellect. The Rocket believes that every event, including the marriage of the Prince and Princess, is dedicated to honoring himself and his own obvious grandeur. The Frog believes also in his own great musical prowess and that he need not listen to anyone else speak, since anyone who is of good society already would agree with him. The Rocket puts great emphasis on his genealogy, though nobody seems to care, and considers himself an intimate friend of the Prince despite the fact that he has never met him. Everything that the Rocket considers valuable about himself is based on his own testimony and is ultimately a farce.
The delusions held by the King, the Rocket, and the Frog cannot be objectively true. The King believes himself to be a great musician, though his Courtiers know otherwise. Both the Rocket and the Frog are of the (mutually exclusive) opinion that everyone ought to listen to them, as they are the only ones with anything of importance to say, which causes conflict when they meet since neither of them has any interest in listening to the other. The Rocket also operates on the assumption that everyone greatly admires him, when in fact, no one does. For the King, the Rocket, and the Frog, these delusions are necessary to maintain their own sense of self-importance. If they were to have any grasp of objective reality and set their delusions aside, they would be forced to realize that they are each largely insignificant.
Even though both the King and the Frog live in delusional, subjective realities, the people around them play along with their delusions or at least do not contradict them—as opposed to the Rocket, who is alone in his conviction—demonstrating how an entire group can be led to reinforce a delusion borne out of a single individual’s arrogance. Though the narrator definitively states that the King is a dreadful musician, the people of the Court applaud every time that he plays. Due to his influence and his subjects’ unwillingness to defy him, the King’s delusion of being a talented musician is reciprocated and reinforced by the Courtiers’ positive reinforcement, even though that is not how they truly see him. Likewise, the Frog, though he is not a powerful individual, lives in the shared delusion with the rest of his glee club that everyone finds croaking to be a beautiful sound and enjoys the frogs’ all-night noise-making. The Frog and his cohort misinterpret the fact that they are annoyingly keeping the farmer’s wife awake all night as proof of their immense popularity. With no one to contradict them, their delusion becomes shared within their group and mutually reinforced.
Beyond merely buying into the delusions of the King, the entire Court suffers its own sincerely held delusions borne out of their own ideals, suggesting that society at large can be similarly misled and lose their grasp of objectivity. The Rocket’s grandeur and the King’s musical prowess are both expressly denied by the narrator. Though the Rocket believes he is remarkable until his dying breath, the narrator interjects and states that he has died in obscurity. Likewise, though the King believes that he is talented and his subjects applaud, the narrator interjects and states that of course everyone knew he was dreadful, they were just playing along. Although the delusion is shared among the Court, the Courtiers are only play-acting and do not truly believe it. By contrast, the narrator does not interject when describing the magical crystal chalice shared by the Prince and Princess. The entire Court truly believes that the chalice is magical (remaining clear if true lovers drink from it, but clouding gray if used by people who were not in love) and the narrator lets this fact stand, even though the reader will immediately surmise that it is just a regular cup. In their idealization of a perfect fairytale marriage, the whole Court has formed their own delusion, just as they are similarly deluded when believing that the King’s doubling of the Page’s salary is anything more than a hollow gesture. This extrapolation of delusion from an individual to an entire society shows that everyone runs the risk of letting arrogance of prideful ideals about how the world should work delude them, distorting the world around them and preventing them from seeing reality for what it truly is.
Wilde, who was himself an opulent and self-important figure, seems to be mocking himself with the story’s self-absorbed characters. The tenuous grasp of reality shown by the King, the Rocket, and the Frog demonstrates the way in which an inflated self-importance leads to a delusional outlook on the world. This is an obviously negative outcome, and one to be avoided. However, Wilde complicates the moral argument by pointing out that an entire society may be drawn into such delusions by their own prideful ideals.
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Pride, Arrogance, and Delusion ThemeTracker
Pride, Arrogance, and Delusion Quotes in The Remarkable Rocket
“She was like a white rose before,” said a young Page to his neighbour, “but she is like a red rose now;” and the whole Court was delighted.
For the next three days everybody went about saying, “White rose, Red rose, Red rose, White rose;” and the King gave orders that the Page's salary was to be doubled. As he received no salary at all this was not of much use to him, but it was considered a great honour, and was duly published in the Court Gazette.
As soon as there was perfect silence, the Rocket coughed a third time and began. He spoke with a very slow, distinct voice, as if he was dictating his memoirs, and always looked over the shoulder of the person to whom he was talking. In fact, he had a most distinguished manner.
“I am laughing because I am happy,” replied the Cracker.
“That is a very selfish reason,” said the Rocket angrily. “What right have you to be happy? You should be thinking about others. In fact, you should be thinking about me. I am always thinking about myself, and I expect everybody else to do the same. That is what is called sympathy. It is a beautiful virtue, and I possess it in a high degree.”
“The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.”
[The Rocket] actually burst into real tears, which flowed down his stick like raindrops, and nearly drowned two little beetles, who were just thinking of setting up house together, and were looking for a nice dry spot to live in.
Every one was a great success except the Remarkable Rocket. He was so damp with crying that he could not go off at all. The best thing in him was the gunpowder, and that was so wet with tears that it was of no use. All his poor relations, to whom he would never speak, except with a sneer, shot up into the sky like wonderful golden flowers with blossoms of fire.
“Bad Rocket? Bad Rocket?” he said as he whirled through the air; “impossible! Grand Rocket, that is what the man said. Bad and Grand sound very much the same, indeed they often are the same.”
“[…] I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time, and prevents arguments [...] Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society holds exactly the same opinions.”
“Now I am going to explode,” he cried. “I shall set the whole world on fire, and make such a noise, that nobody will talk about anything else for a whole year.” And he certainly did explode. Bang! Bang! Bang! went the gunpowder. There was no doubt about it.
But nobody heard him, not even the two little boys, for they were sound asleep.
