It’s difficult to determine exactly what a piece of digital media is really trying to say. With “My Boyfriend Came Back From The War,” it seems as though the author is giving readers a fragmented view of a sort of post war loss of innocence. This piece reminded me of Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home,” Both seem to deal with the psychological effects of war (PTSD) and how it can affect one’s personal relationships. The disjointed nature to this narrative of this story is reflected in the structure of the page: the hard contrast of black and white, and the separation of the text into different boxes.
The story doesn’t exactly unfold the way a regular story would, with a set beginning/middle/end, but rather works with a more flexible structure. There are a few beginning links that must be clicked on first, and the order of links inside each box is always same, but the reader is given the opportunity to manipulate the order of how the “middle” events occur. What makes this so interesting is that, in reading this way, different parts of the story are highlighted each time, and likewise different parts are downplayed. Because of this I think that it could be argued that, to a certain extent, order determines relevance.
It seems like there really is so much going on in this piece. Instead of attempting to sum up the entire narrative, I wanted to try to focus in on the theme of sight. There were a lot of interesting visual references running through the dialogue, including:
I can’t see you
Don’t you see?
You don’t trust me, I see
Look!!!
Look it’s so beautiful (x2)
Please look at me
They never saw the snow
Haven’t you seen tigers there?
Maybe you look at me?
On a broad level, I thought that maybe this meant that the boyfriend’s change could have been a physical loss of sight, but it could also stand as metaphorical; eyes being the “window to the soul” sort of thing.
I think that this idea of having two fronts, in sense, is expanded on in the line:
“Red
Green
Blue”
On a scientific level, the way that the human eye receptors work is through perceiving light through three different color channels. The three color channels are red, green and blue. Using the combination of how each of these three primary channels perceives an object, subtleties in hue become apparent; kind of like a complex system of mixing and un-mixing the three different colors (Most electronic devices with color displays are based on this model).
This line is the only part of the page that contains color other than black, white and gray. This gives the sense that there is some sort of loss of color, either physical or metaphorically in the life of the boyfriend; some sort of deficiency.
I don’t know if any of what I have gotten out of this piece was put in purposefully or not, and I don’t know if I should care.
I don’t know if all the references to sight or vision are there on purpose either, but you’ve definitely made a compelling case that we should pay attention to them. Focusing on this particular aspect of MBCBFTW highlights the one frame you note that contains color — something we might otherwise overlook or just think of as quirky. Instead, you argue that it might even hold a key toward greater understanding of the work, which I think is a very productive way to “read” this “story.”