After Friday’s discussion on the child’s “choose your own
adventure” books, I found myself in a state of déjà vu. As a child, I was a big
fan of the Goosebumps collections and
ironically, especially the ones where you got to choose what action you wished
to character to take. However, just as Professor Schwartz described in class,
the reader doesn’t have a really large selection of choices. In other words,
the reader is not able to do ANYTHING and choose whatever they want to do.
Instead, the author forces the reader to select a choice out of a choice of 2
or more. As a child, I always though that the reader never really got the
freedom to choose and select exactly what they wanted to do. Once again as
Professor Schwartz noted, in context to the course, this intention in which the
author made the story was practically a manipulation technique. By allowing the
reader to choose out of a small parameter of choices, a sense of control and
power is given to the reader. However, in reality it is the author’s manipulation
to make the reader think that they are in control. As always, I though of this
idea and tried to relate it to something that we encounter everyday. Also mentioned
in class, I found that the car example to be the most revealing of
manipulation. From our car dealers today, we are made to believe that a car was
made for us and that we have the full choice in what car to choose. However,
when going to a dealership, we aren’t really choosing the car that is made for
us but instead selecting the car that we think is best fit for us. I found this
to be another example of modern day manipulation in the everyday market.
The interesting thing about manipulation in literature is when you make (and if you do make) the distinction between its power in nonfiction versus in fiction. In nonfiction, since we are assuming that what we are reading is true and can be fact-checked, we are far more susceptible to being manipulated. When reading nonfiction, we read with a grain of salt and tend to not take everything we read seriously, It is far more shocking when we discover that a piece of nonfiction is actually false since we were promised by the author that we could trust what we were reading. In fiction, the author can trick us and get away with it since they have a specific creative license.
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