1 two and 3
As a film major I often find the connection between perception and understanding to be very interesting. I once read a whole paragraph of completely jumbled words. It made complete sense to me; I could hardly even tell the words were jumbled, because the human brain does not read each individual letter in a word but rather looks at the word as a whole. I would say, in the very least the connections that people are able to pull form a series of jumbled words is just as powerful as words that are written out correctly. But if you bring their attention to the fact that the words are jumbled then I would say that their perception changes. Suddenly what the words represent become more profound because they suddenly will comprehend that they are pulling meaning out of paper and ink. It works the same way in film. In Schedulers List, Spielberg, shot the whole thing in black and white, so when suddenly in the middle of the ghetto a little girl in red shows up she sticks out. The girl sticks out the picture obviously, but she brings with her the horrific violence in the scene. Suddenly it all seems to actually be happening. I have not yet seen a book that uses jumbled words to make a passage stand out, but I have read one that uses the list in much the same way.
In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien introduces his characters with lists. Instead of talking strictly about the actions of the characters, O’Brien allows the reader to interpret what these guys must have been like based on their surroundings. He lists off all the different things that the men carry at several different times in the first chapter. The first time he does it he does it is on page two of the entire novel, then he does it again and again leading up to page sixteen. On page fourteen after the characters have been introduced and the “List Theme” is well established he has one of the longest lists in the entire novel. Right before this list is the list about their lucky charms, and after a passage so full of vulnerability I understood the importance of their cargo. So on fourteen when he begins to list off the everyday items that they had on them he creates characters that are as tangible as any one of those items might appear to be to me. The same kind of thing is done in a post titled the “Sunshine Post” by Lt G. He too uses as list to create character development, although in the beginning of the post he points out that is his intention rather than letting the reader interpret the lists meaning. He feels he is becoming too cynical so he makes a list of things that make him happy and keep him fresh. Unlike O’Brien Lt. G’s list is a list of particular circumstances and background rather than items. However the effect is similar in the sense that the mind draws its own connections between these isolated events and pulls them together to form, as Lt. G describes, the delicious pistachio center of his soul.
Filed by whitepe at April 16th, 2008 under Uncategorized
