Monday, February 24, 2014
Authors
Physically speaking, all writing is the same thing. It it a series of words strung together recorded in some form or another. Writers attempt to create the most meaningful experience for the reader from this act. When Vonnegut and O'Brien include writers within their own pages, they are encouraging us to really look for what makes a writer good at what he is doing. Whereas it may seem that O'Brien writes more instructively about storytelling, Vonnegut too incorporates believability into Cat's Cradle. As a reader, I know that I feel as though the ever-mysterious Jonah is in fact a good one; I am given no reason to believe that he isn't. If their characters can convince us that they are the source of what we are reading, doesn't that make the actual authors twice as persuasive?
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I knew both books had storytelling as an important part of each story, but I didn't realize that the fact that both main characters are writers could be influential to our perception of the story. Because both protagonists are writers, we imagine them as real people and the story being told through them. This causes the reader to forget that they're just constructs of the author. I agree with you, I think it makes the actual authors more persuasive, because it causes us to forget who exactly is writing the book.
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