When first exploring Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, I found it very similar and yet very different from Hegirascope. It found the two similar in the sense that they both contained a sort of jumbled structure. There was never a point in the hypertext where the entire paged contained one single meaning. With My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, I found it much easier to follow and a much more pleasant experience in general when compared with Hegirascope. I felt that although it was Lialina’s story I was the one who controlled the path it took. As we read, we all make our own interpretations and take our own meanings from the stories we read, but with hypertexts such as My Boyfriend Came Back from the War and Hegirascope it almost seems as if their story is shaped by your own experiences. I think when most of us read we approach the work with certain expectations that may sometimes limit us. With these hypertexts, I think it is very difficult if not nearly impossible to approach them with any sort of expectations becuase they are so structurally different. With Hegirascope, I found myself very confused throughout the whole experience. Like I was going through a maze or solving an unsolvable puzzle. However, with My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, I found the structure of the piece much more appealing. With the author’s use of frames and the different links in each frame, while still keeping the old frames, I was able to follow each sub-story until it finished and then move on to the next. That made it much easier to understand what message the author was trying to convey and how each of the smaller messages pertained the bigger picture.
Constance