Week of 13/11/14: Labyrinths

Prompt: 1- Analyze the impact word choice has on the meaning or tone of a text.
2- Analyze how dialogue or specific incidents reveal information about characters. Make sure to include textual evidence.
Pages read:  Skipped around over many of the short-stories, so approx. 80 pages of nonstop existentialism and related philosophy

This will be a good challenge I suppose.  I mean, it's almost as if I pick some of the worst books for every assigned prompt.  Oh well, at least they are short stories; if you can call these "selected works" that term.  And, as we all know quite well: short stories require astute word choice.  The way the author chooses to execute this is a factor that really sets apart this book, making it really interesting to examine under this "lens", but also very horribly complex.  Although I wouldn't call the narrator necessarily unreliable, large aspects of these pieces are neither fiction nor nonfiction and all are opinion.  As Borges says in one of these vague stories, "every philosophy is by definition a dialectical game ".  So as you can see, everything pertaining to this is just meaningless words; but the words also hold out-of-wordly meanings.

As is the author's intention, nothing really impacts anything but anything impacts everything.  This man is worse than Oscar Wilde with the paradoxes... So, as to not confuse neither I nor yourself, I'll keep these instances of impact simple and explicit.   Seemingly the most obvious occurrence of clever word choice happens repeatedly during "The Lottery Of Babylon".  Although we never are told explicitly (anything) if the system is validly corrupt or not, the author's repetition of the word "interpolated" not only tells the reader of the nature of these drawings, but of the little-described beings of power.  Thus, impacting the reader and the meaning more than the outcome of the story.  To interpolate (in this context) means to insert false/misleading information.  In the case of life-altering and life-taking Lotteries, this is obviously a malevolent force taking place revealed to us through a simple word.  Because these stories are so short, and if not interpreted fully, vague; one words possible meaning enforces many possible outcomes and feelings.

100+ pages and not one single instance of external dialogue.  I think I'm in love.  In all seriousness, dialogue is something I find to be a necessary evil in many circumstances.  Maybe that's why I like philosophy and psychology so much ~ self examination and internal dialogues reveal the most to me as a reader.  One very notable instance of this  revealing is in L the story of "The Circular Ruins".  In summary, a man seemingly stranded on a deserted island begins hallucinating, dreaming.  Through the doubts of his thoughts his character is shown, as well as the basic human nature/desire to have control over another.  And on yet a deeper, metaphysical level, the mans' doubts of existence.  However, the latter is shown through mainly the authors diction (and probably the best situational irony I have ever read).  The most fitting examples I can give you of the former are, "each night he perceived it with greater clarity... he perceived it, lived it, from many different angles... the examination satisfied him".  From these lines we can infer the nature of the mans character: benevolent and determined.  As for a specific event, when the nameless man finds out of his metaphysical's sons success', he feels extreme grief for what he has put on the child.  Thus, giving the reader one of the (surprisingly) minor themes and more on the mysterious mystic man's character.