Formula, Leads, and Fleshed Out Claim.

Claim: Aimee Bender alienates and confuses the reader in The Healer in order to have the reader draw connections to the characters, so that the themes in the book stand out more to the reader.

Question (Original): Why does Aimee Bender want to alienate the reader?

Trouble: The Healer doesn’t follow many of the status quo assumptions about short stories or allegories. There’s very few connections that readers can draw from the text, the plot lacks continuity, and there aren’t definite themes that are easy to understand or see. These things alienate the reader from the text, confusing him/her.

Status Quo: The Healer seems to be a short story and/or allegory. Short stories and allegories should be easy to understand, should connect to the real world, and those real-world connections often give the reader a theme or moral.

Question (Final): If readers expect short stories and allegories to be easy to understand and to have us make connections to the real world that give us a lesson or moral about the world, but The Healer does the opposite by being confusing, lacking things to connect to, and having no obvious themes, which makes readers confused and alienates readers, then why did Aimee Bender choose to alienate readers in The Healer?

*NOTE*: Things in bold are leads I want to unpack/develop as I go on.

Fleshed Out Claim

            The reason that Aimee Bender alienates and confuses the reader in The Healer is to give the readers connections to the already isolated characters in the book, because this makes the complex themes of the book stronger and more meaningful to the reader by making the themes more connectible to the reader’s experience while reading the book. We can see examples of how Bender alienates the reader to make their experience relate to the experience of the characters when Bender introduces characters like Roy, and also in the interactions between the outcast characters in the story.