"The graveyard was in the woods and twilight was coming on. Nothing broke the death like stillness except the occasional twitter of a bird. My spirit was overawed by the solemnity of the scene. For more than ten years I had frequented this spot, but never had it seemed to me so sacred as now. A black stump, at the head of my mother's grave, was all that remained of a tree my father had planted. His grave was marked by a small wooden board, bearing his name, the letters of which were nearly obliterated. I knelt down and kissed them, and poured forth a prayer to God for guidance and support in the perilous step I was about to take. As I passed the wreck of the old meeting house, where, before Nat Turner's time, the slaves had been allowed to meet for worship, I seemed to hear my father's voice come from it, bidding me not to tarry till I reached freedom or the grave. I rushed on with renovated hopes. My trust in God had been strengthened by that prayer among the graves."
-Harriet Jacobs,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
As I've said before, the mind is very pliable. And, as I've said before,
Welcome back. So what's going on in this little excerpt (reproduced from here)? Well, the first sixty or so pages of this book are devoted to painting the picture of the bear-trap slavery is. Linda is so totally stuck in slavery that there is no out. We even see her trying, piece by piece, to get out, and we see the evil Dr. Flint cut each and every one of those attempts out from under her. It's like the child-on-an-electric-carpet experiment (don't try this at home), when you put a four or five year old on an electric carpet. Obviously, the child will jump off. Now, put the child + carpet in a class cage, so the child can't jump off. Inevitably, the kid will give up, and lay on the carpet, being shocked.
The same thing happens to Linda. She is laying on the floor of slavery, loosing her will to carry on, and can't find a way out. For me, at least, this moment at the graveyard is when she figures out that, whether or not there is a way out, she's going to keep on fighting to get out. She's going to either win or die.
But that doesn't really answer the question of why I like this piece so much. Or does it? Good writing does three things.
1.
Reality check. When you read, your eye moves across the page, and interprets individual glyphs as phonetic sounds. Somehow, all those sounds get put together to form something extremely close to reality. For example, I'll bet that while you read these very words you're not totally aware of your surroundings, because your reality has become the reality of someone explaining to you why he liked a paragraph in a book. Not the reality of you sitting at your desk looking at a LCD display while someone in the other room is making a racket. In significantly less words, good writing pulls you in. This piece did a fantastic job at that for me. I could see this scene as I was reading it.
2.
Go back and re-read the excerpt at the beginning of this post. Doesn't it make you sad, yet hopeful? Like I said before, this is a major turning point in the evolution of the main character. I don't think I need to go much further into this one, or
3.
this one, because I've already explained how this moves the story forward.
Hopefully you got a little insight into how I read. I'm sorry if this post seemed discordant or discon junctant, but I'm a wee bit frazzled. Keep your head in the game!
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girlis all the more emotionally affecting because it's non-fiction. It actually happened. So why is this passage worth my special attention? Stick around after the break, and you'll find out.
Welcome back. So what's going on in this little excerpt (reproduced from here)? Well, the first sixty or so pages of this book are devoted to painting the picture of the bear-trap slavery is. Linda is so totally stuck in slavery that there is no out. We even see her trying, piece by piece, to get out, and we see the evil Dr. Flint cut each and every one of those attempts out from under her. It's like the child-on-an-electric-carpet experiment (don't try this at home), when you put a four or five year old on an electric carpet. Obviously, the child will jump off. Now, put the child + carpet in a class cage, so the child can't jump off. Inevitably, the kid will give up, and lay on the carpet, being shocked.
The same thing happens to Linda. She is laying on the floor of slavery, loosing her will to carry on, and can't find a way out. For me, at least, this moment at the graveyard is when she figures out that, whether or not there is a way out, she's going to keep on fighting to get out. She's going to either win or die.
But that doesn't really answer the question of why I like this piece so much. Or does it? Good writing does three things.
- It convinces the reader that what they are reading is reality.
- It creates an emotional connection between the reader and the object of the story, most often referred to as the main character.
- It moves the story forward.
1.
Reality check. When you read, your eye moves across the page, and interprets individual glyphs as phonetic sounds. Somehow, all those sounds get put together to form something extremely close to reality. For example, I'll bet that while you read these very words you're not totally aware of your surroundings, because your reality has become the reality of someone explaining to you why he liked a paragraph in a book. Not the reality of you sitting at your desk looking at a LCD display while someone in the other room is making a racket. In significantly less words, good writing pulls you in. This piece did a fantastic job at that for me. I could see this scene as I was reading it.
2.
Go back and re-read the excerpt at the beginning of this post. Doesn't it make you sad, yet hopeful? Like I said before, this is a major turning point in the evolution of the main character. I don't think I need to go much further into this one, or
3.
this one, because I've already explained how this moves the story forward.
Hopefully you got a little insight into how I read. I'm sorry if this post seemed discordant or discon junctant, but I'm a wee bit frazzled. Keep your head in the game!
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