Monday, March 31, 2014
Seeing Is Believing
It's interesting that the final chapter offers an enormous amount of sensory details, contributing to a sense of reality, yet blurs lines regarding the authorship of the story and letters. Many of the sensory details have to do with a lack of of sense. We read about a lack of light. The narrator feels around the room. The narrator can't see faces, because they're covered with scarves. The environment seems stagnant, yet the narrator searches on - for a pulse, for a sound, for answers. Everything seems so real to reader. The narrator drifts to a shipwreck then - this also has many sensory details. Everything seems so real, which only leads me to question everything further. Much like the sensory details take us into the story, the sounds that the narrator thinks he or she hears from Friday's mouth, or anything the narrator sees around him or her stimulates memories and the imagination. Why does Coetzee include so many details in a chapter that crosses into the imaginary? What can we be left to trust from what we read then?
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It is interesting to me that you see the sensory details as elements that bring an additional "realness" to this text. I found that these bits and pieces were what almost removed the sense of reality in this section since it created an atmosphere where concepts beyond words on paper could be explored.
ReplyDeleteI can understand the points you each make. I found that the amount of sensory details presented in Part IV made me feel like I was in a dream, observing the narrator's every action from the outside. For me, it was more that the compilation of sensory images along with the multiple changes in setting detracted from the realness of the narration. I was able to follow along and feel the vividness of the story if I were analyzing the story sentence by sentence, but it was putting all the sensory images together and considering Part IV as a whole that made me feel out of touch with reality.
ReplyDeleteI think you all make great points. When I was reading part four, I thought the sensory details were fascinating, though I found the similes to certain materials even more so because similar to Barbara, I felt it was dream-like or make-believe. Although Coetzee uses similes to explain the characters, I found myself wondering if the characters were actually just props, really made out of those materials that Coetzee referred to, such as wood, straw, and paper. Regardless of whether we truly think of the characters as made out of the materials they are compared to, Coetzee's descriptions make the characters seem as if they are puppets and Coetzee is possibly the ultimate puppet-master, though there could debatably be many puppet-masters in the novel.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I was drawn to your post by the title. The idea of "seeing is believing" has always been an enthralling idea to me. More importantly, this elicits the idea of belief through senses. For example, just because I can though something, does it mean that "tangible" item really exists? Or, on the other hand, does something have to be tangible to be believable? Both are profound, and arguable unanswerable questions, and I applaud Coetzee's foresight and intuition for taking advantage of these ideas. As a concluding point, I am a christian; a firm believer, so to speak, but there isn't much that is "tangible" that I can use as a foundation for my faith. But, none-the-less, I still go one believing...
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