Wednesday, December 2, 2009

"you" are who you are

Another confusing book that we as the readers get drawn into. Up until the last page we are connected to the character in the novel. Just like Aura we are helping the story build and as the reader we make the characters. By becoming one of the characters to keep the novel and story going the reader must keep reading. By going with the flow you as the reader are kind of giving up. The author had a plan and you are leading right into it. The reader at some point needs to back off and put the book down to "save themself" from the book. By doing this the reader is no longer the character.
Also in Phillip K. Dick's novel Man in the High Castle the characters knew they were part of a story and not really a person in the world. When we take ourselves out of the novel the characters have to pick and decide what to do next. The last page of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller the character is stating he is almost finished with the book. At that moment we as the reader are too. We must take ourselves away from being involved with the charcter or we will be stuck inside the novel.
The ending is him going to marry Ledmilla but we don't marry her. The other ending would be him dying but we don't die just because we stop reading. This is when we are taken out of the novel. Our lives aren't changing like the character in the novel. We are finally back to being one and him another.

1 comment:

  1. I thought it was weird that we focused on how we came out of the novel so much. I thought the point of reading was to have the novel stick with you? Do you think that maybe the way we become disconnected from the "you" in the story hinders our ability to analyze the book?

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