From this we discussed what this story made us think about, here are some bullet points that I came up with from our discussion:
- The use of 'I' evolves the reader as it is personal, it is stronger than you or we
- The' knife' sets the mood/atmosphere- for me this made me think of a tragedy and something dark
- As readers we begin to fill in the gaps of the story and make it our own
- The readers personality and tastes in genres shows the idea of what the story is about
- We generally thought that the narrator was male
- The 'knife' could be metaphorical for a problem, a cover of something worse
- Connotations with the knife of violence
- No resolution
- Little narrative time.
These points show just how open to interpretation a narrative can be. What do you make of it?
ReplyDeleteI think the short story- 'When I woke up the knife was still there' is very powerful as it immediately intrigues me. My first impressions are of a tragedy or horror, where the 'I' has killed someone the previous day and wakes up to find the horror of what he(I immediately think of a male for some reason) has done and the concept of how he deals with being a murderer. I think that this was not a planned killing perhaps an argument between family or friends that became violent at some point.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I love the concept of making up my own story based on the extract I would like to know what the real story is about and if my perceptions were correct for the genre and that if this is not a horror but just simply a household knife has been left on the side and found the next morning as some in the class imagined.
The knife is associated with violence, death and generally dark connotations so it sets the tone of the story straight away but this could be minor compared to something else in the rest of the story if there is any more.
Recently after studying the story above I found a book in the library called Ultraviolet by R J Anderson. The blurb just said- Once upon a time there was a girl who was special.
This is not her story.
Unless you count the part where I killed her.
Again this made me want to read the story but I did not expect what the story would be about at all. The rough story line is that the main character Alison wakes up in a Psychiatric Unit and cannot remember anything of what has happened to her. Its her story of life in the mental home and how she comes to terms with the fact that she is not insane as she thought and has been told because she has undiagnosed Synesthesia( where you see more colours than the usual and colours describe feelings and letters too) which made people think that as she was seeing things that others couldn't, she was thought to be insane. Its about how she reacts to the other patients and forms relationships and also family problems around her condition.Sorry if this is a spoiler- she also has not a murderer as she thought but just suffering with her condition that gets worse around the Tori. So overall it is totally not what I expected from the blurb in anyway and a good book to read as I did not know much about mental health problems so it helped me to understand how people deal with their conditions and what the side effects are and how it is a totally different way to think life as.
Thanks for these comments. I hope you enjoy the novel.
ReplyDelete