Weekly Response #14

Emily Schmitt

ENG 280

Natalie M. Phillips

11/30/12

Weekly Response #14

“The very process of making sense of what we read appears to be grounded in out ability to invest the flimsy verbal constructions that we generously call ‘characters’ with a potential for a variety of thoughts, feelings, and desires, and then to look for the ‘cues’ that allow us to guess at their feelings and thus to predict their actions” (Zunshine 198)

“Siobhan said that I should write something I would want to read myself. Mostly I read books about science and maths. I do not like proper novels. In proper novels people say things like, ‘I am veined with iron, with silver and with streaks of common mud. I cannot contract in the firm first which those clench who do not depend on stimulus.’ What does this mean? I do not know” (Haddon 4).

Q: How does a writers understanding of character feelings and actions affect what the reader can infer about what they are reading. Further what does an inability to interpret these signals do to the reading experience?

A: In my extremely inarticulate question, what I wanted to bring up was that even though Christopher is different in that he can’t interpret the bodily cues and language that we can, we are all still limited by our own understandings of what is what. Perhaps the passage was meant to demonstrate to the reader how Christopher approaches the text, but we the reader are also left floundering at the short excerpt that Christopher has quoted to us. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that even if we do not suffer to the same degree, we can all understand what Christopher is referring to because all of our interpretations of body language and textual cues are learned and arbitrary. It is often that we can misunderstand those cues, like Christopher who just doesn’t know what they mean at all.

Works Cited

Zunshine, Lisa.  “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional

            Consciousness”. Cognitive Narratology. Print.

Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. New York: Random House,

2003. Print.