Exploratory Draft

            I’m interested in Aimee Bender’s purpose for making the Healer so hard to follow and understand. This makes me want to ask why Bender made The Healer intentionally odd and hard for readers to digest. One way to think about this is that although The Healer was confusing, Bender’s writing style in The Healer allowed readers to connect with some aspects of the book and draw the reader in, while having confusing parts of the book that made the reader think deeply about the book.

            This idea is interesting, I think, but I don’t know how easy it will be to show that the complexities really make a reader think deeply. But that is definitely what happened to me, and for the connectivity, there were definitely parts of the book that connected with “normal” human emotions, as we discussed in class. So, I think I want to focus more on the thinking deeply part.

            Aimee Bender constantly has us re-thinking our status quo assumptions in The Healer. At first, readers think it’s an Allegory, which comes with a certain set of assumptions, like that it will have a lesson/moral, etc. But quickly, after the first couple of paragraphs, we realize this is not really an allegory at all. Throughout the book, characters come and go often, and the only consistent characters, fire girl, ice girl, and the narrator, all change dramatically in personality, and we don’t even get names or much basic information about many of these people. Ice Girl leaves at the end of the book, fire girl is confused and doesn’t make a lot of sense through the book, though she might be the most relatable, and the Narrator is constantly trying to seem weirder. This kind of makes me think that Bender doesn’t want readers to become attached to characters, but she DOES want readers to connect with the book in some ways. This is how the book is confusing.

            But what does it do? Why would Bender want a book that purposely shifts constantly, giving the reader new things to think about at the turn of every page? There are several different reasons I can think of, but I don’t know if I can easily show the reasoning or support them. A first possibility is that Bender is hiding meaning in the little that we can relate to. Indeed, the Fire Girl and Ice Girl are essentially alienated, and although in the beginning, the “Allegorical” part, no one notices, certainly during the middle and end people do notice their differences from society. Other characters are alienated too, like Roy and even the Narrator to some extent is certainly not the average person. So, by alienating the READER as well, perhaps Bender is trying to put us in the shoes of these characters, confused and somewhat alone, as they are.

But So What? If we assume this is the reader, what is important about it? What would make this a valid reason for Bender to write an entire book based around it? Well, the reader has been thrown around by the text; confused and doesn’t really know what the text is trying to say or do. This is obviously intentional. This would make the reader look for relatable things, as a foothold to understand the text. If there were no things that were relatable to the average person, no one would understand the story whatsoever. And there are a couple of simple and obvious things that would help the reader understand the text, and if he/she looked deep enough, certainly there are some underlying themes in the story. So what I see here is that Bender is confusing and alienating the reader as a method to show underlying themes of the book in a way that although makes it not inherently obvious, does make the meanings of alienation, friendship, and comforting deeper, because the reader has essentially felt what Fire Girl (mostly) felt, which is a finalizing connection to the book once the meanings become clear.

So, if this is the claim, and the question remains the same, the trouble should be that Bender is purposely making the book hard to follow and confusing, and this is not what Faber’s “quality” is all about. The SQ would be that we expect to see books as a way to give us Faber’s “quality”, texture, etc. and that that makes a good book. I think this is a good idea. There’s definitely evidence of the alienation of not only characters, but of the alienation of readers through confusion too.

I think this is closer to what I was looking for when I had the idea of “deeper thinking” originally, something more specific and also easier to find evidence and information for.