Wednesday, April 8, 2009

#15 Style

What do you conceive to be the story’s central purpose? How fully has it achieved that purpose?

For a long time, I couldn’t figure out what the story’s purpose was, which really intrigued me, as I loved this book to pieces, how could it just have no purpose, or such a hidden one. I have come to the conclusion that this novel has a bunch of purposes, first of all, I think the author was trying to write a very intriguing story that kept you interested, and after you read that story, you had all of a sudden a better understanding of people, and possibly even life, depending on how deeply you reflected on what you read. The story taught growth and mannerisms of people. For example, half the people in the Mennonite community were just not happy being there and would have loved to leave. No one was making them stay, why did they stay and live unhappily, waiting to die? “The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feeling of unhappiness. Silentium. The only thing you hear at night is semis barreling down the highway carting drugged animals off to be attacked with knives. People here just can’t wait to die, it seems. It’s the main event. The only reason we’re not all snuffed at birth is because that would reduce our suffering by a lifetime. My guidance counselor has suggested to me that I change my attitude about this place and learn to love it. But I do, I told her. Oh that’s rich, she said. That’s rich.”(p. 6) At the very beginning of the novel, Nomi complains about Menno Simons, the ‘inventor’ of Mennonites, at the end of the novel, she still hasn’t got him figured out, and I think that this is a significant point too; the novel teaches process resulting in growth, and process resulting in no conclusion. If I had to say what the story’s central purpose is, I would say either ‘process’ or ‘purpose’, but once again, it seems difficult for me to conceive of someone who had not read this novel, understanding what I mean by ‘process’ or ‘purpose’, but I’ll try once more with a quotation at the end of the novel where Nomi considers why Menno has lead all these people into the depths of unhappiness and exile of their beloved family members; like I said previously, she hasn’t figured this out. (For the record, Lids is Nomi’s friend who is very sick (it sounds like cancer to me) but the doctors can’t figure out her illness, so they are trying shock therapy, much to Lid’s and Nomi’s dismay.) “ I thought about Menno Simons and what kind of childhood he must have had to want to lead people into a barren place to wait out the Rapture and block out the world and make them really believe that looking straight through a person like she wasn’t there, a person they’d loved like crazy all their lives, was the right thing to do. I thought about Lids in Eden having her brain electrified and I thought about that little piece of newspaper that had floated down into our town from some other town that had on it the words: for the way things could have been.”(319)


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