As I’ve said in class, I’m not a fan of the experimental things being done with text in this book. For me, they’re a distraction: the blank pages, page after page with only a single line on them, pages whose whitespace is being slowly invaded by words written over and over each other until they’re just an amorphous blob of black, the run-on sentences (like this one), the red-ink circles — they pull me out of the story, or I find myself skimming over them. I do like the illustrations though. I wish that more books were illustrated these days, with photographs or drawings, because I think that pictures can add a lot to a story without it being distracting.<\/p>\n
However, having now finished the book, I will say that the form of the text, even though I don’t like it, does serve to illustrate the wounded pysches of all the characters.\u00a0 Everyone, from Grandma to Oskar to Oskar’s grandfather, is an unhealed survivor of trauma.\u00a0 Each character has not only their own voice and their own trauma, but their own unique textual style.<\/p>\n
Grandma doesn’t indent, use quotation marks, or put any space between her paragraphs.\u00a0 She is fully-justified, quadruple spaces after her periods, and she puts dialogue on different lines.\u00a0 To me, her text looks confined and constrained — she and her words must line up on at least one side in an orderly, and whatever pain happens in the middle is hidden.\u00a0 She controls her text because it’s all she can control.<\/p>\n
Oskar is stream-of-consciousness.\u00a0 Speech tags happen anywhere in his paragraphs and those paragraphs don’t stop just because someone has spoken.\u00a0 Paragraph breaks happen with a logic entirely of Oskar’s making, and I don’t really understand the whys of when he does break.\u00a0 Oskar’s text is fearful.\u00a0 When you’re afraid, really terrified, people’s voices blend together, and you perceive the world around you in chunks.\u00a0 Oskar’s need to find meaning saturates his text, and even when meaningful things happen he overlooks them because of his fear.\u00a0 Even his fantasies are about fear, inflicting fear on others through violence.\u00a0 Oskar doesn’t quite know how to be happy any more.<\/p>\n
Grandfather’s text is all one huge block of words.\u00a0 Like Oskar, his own fear comes out through his lack of dialogue markers.\u00a0 People’s words and voices blend together — sometimes one has to read and re-read a section of dialogue in order to puzzle out who has said what.\u00a0 Grandfather’s text is often the most experimental.\u00a0 He’s responsible for the one-line pages, the black swallowing the page, the red circles that start out sensical but degenerate into nonsense (as far as I can tell).\u00a0 He has no other outlet for his words because he does not speak, and his text reflects that.\u00a0 His frustrated creativity infects his text with experimentalism because his trauma has denied him a voice with which to express himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I’ve said in class, I’m not a fan of the experimental things being done with text in this book. For me, they’re a distraction: the blank pages, page after page with only a single line on them, pages whose whitespace is being slowly invaded by words written over and over each other until they’re… Continue reading Form, function, and content<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=817"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":818,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817\/revisions\/818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}