Claim "Chunks"

CLAIM CHUNKS

Claim:

 One way to think about the reason that Aimee Bender alienates and confuses the reader in The Healer is to give the readers connections to the similarly alienated and alone characters in the book, because this makes the complex themes of the book, which come from the characters and their precarious situations, stronger and far 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, and therefore to the themes, when Bender introduces characters like Roy, and also in the interactions between the outcast and strange characters in the story like Fire Girl, Ice Girl, and the narrator, Lisa.

Chunk 1: Aimee Bender alienates and confuses the reader in The Healer

Chunk 2: This give the readers connections to the already isolated characters in the book

                

Part 1: The characters in The Healer are alienated and isolated.

               

  Part 2: If both reader and characters are alienated, then the reader to connect with characters.

Chuck 3: This connection makes the complex themes in the book, which come from the characters and their situation in the book, more meaningful/stronger to the reader, because the reader can more readily connect to the themes.

Part 1: The themes in the book are derived from the alienation of the characters in the story.

Part 2: Being able to connect to characters who show the themes make the themes stronger and more meaningful.

Part 3: Part 2 is true because the reader, like the characters, is also alienated and isolated in reading the story, so the reader understands the alienation-based themes more easily.

Chuck 4 [A+R]:

                Acknowledgement: Some might say that the reader would be able to understand the themes without being alienated first.

                Response: While the reader might be able to see the themes, they wouldn’t be as valuable because alienation is a feeling which isn’t very common, and the themes are based around alienation. So, because the reader gets the feeling of alienation in the text, the themes are more relatable, and therefore stronger and more meaningful, to the reader.

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Essay Draft

The Healer: Confusing and Scary or Meaningful and Deep?

            With lines like “One [girl] had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice,” The Healer, a story by Aimee Bender, seems, at first glance, to be an allegory or a short story. Short stories or allegories should be easy to understand. Along with easy comprehension, allegories tend to have some sort of easily-made connection that links the text to the world. This real-world connection often gives the reader a moral, lesson, or the theme of the book.

            However, The Healer doesn’t agree with any qualities of a short story or allegory. Firstly, it isn’t easy to read, and it’s hard to comprehend, because it’s very strange and the plot is confusing. Furthermore, there don’t seem to be any real-world connections that the reader can make to give him or her lessons or morals. When I read The Healer, expecting a normal allegory or short story, I was confused, as Bender didn’t give any connections for the reader to make, which made me feel alienated and confused. If readers expect a short story or allegory is supposed to be something easy to understand and easy to draw connections from, yet The Healer, which seems like it should be an allegory or normal short story, confuses and alienates the reader with its confusing plot and lack of connections and obvious themes, then what does Bender hope to accomplish by confusing and alienating the reader?

            One way to think about the reason that Aimee Bender alienates and confuses the reader in The Healer is to give the readers connections to the similarly alienated and alone characters in the book, because this makes the complex themes of the book stronger and far 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, and therefore to the themes, when Bender introduces characters like Roy, and also in the interactions between the outcast and strange characters in the story like Fire Girl, Ice Girl, and the narrator, Lisa.

In The Healer, the reader is often made confused and is alienated by the characters in the story. One such instance is when the Lisa and the reader are introduced to Roy. “… [Roy] was a cutter. He cut things into his skin with a razor blade. I saw once; some Saturday when everyone was at a Picnic and I was bored, I wandered into the boys’ bathroom and he was in there and he showed me how he carved letters into his skin. He’d spelled out OUCH on his leg” (Bender 3). Here is an example of how Bender alienates the reader. Immediately, Roy’s qualities seem uncommon, and, if looked at deeper, confusing and troubling. Roy’s being a cutter is strange enough, but this is likely not enough to confuse or alienate a reader. However, Roy’s problems appear to be deeper: He clearly knows he is a cutter, and knows full well that it is hurtful to his body, hence his writing “OUCH” on his leg. Despite this, Roy seems to want to have others practice this behavior. He shows Lisa, the girl who walked into the boy’s bathroom, how he cuts his leg. It seems that he knows that it’s bad, but wants others to do it, which is certainly a little confusing and alienating, especially for a reader who expected the book to have simple connections to the real world- there are no simple connections to be found. The characters in The Healer and their confusing and strange actions and qualities are certainly one cause to the reader’s discomfort while reading The Healer.

Apart from being alienated by the characters, the plot of The Healer plays a part in confusing the reader as well. This is evidenced in the unpredictability and lack of obvious themes in the plot. A large contributing factor to how the plot is so strange and discomforting is the fact that characters appear and disappear in a moment’s notice, making it hard to understand where the plot is going to next. One excellent example of this is how Ice Girl, a main character for most of the story, is removed from the story. “I guess I never told you [Lisa], [Ice Girl] said, but I feel nothing. I just feel ice. I nodded. I wasn’t surprised. She turned a bit. I’m off now, she said, bye” (Bender 8). This unceremonious and surprising exit for one of the more important characters in the story up to that point is surprising, and moreover, very confusing. From the standpoint of the reader, it’s very disorienting to have one of the main characters in the story, one of the characters that guides and directs the flow of the story, leave on a moment’s notice. This is especially true in The Healer, where the reader is already confused- the characters are some of the only things that remain constant, so when the characters disappear suddenly, it completely changes the direction of the story, and the reader is hauled through these sudden twists and turn. The result of this, however, is perhaps even more effective in confusing and alienating the reader: Because of the lack of flow and continuity in the plot, no theme really sticks out as the obvious point to take away from the book. When reading a normal allegory, the reader expects to draw a connection from the text that allows him or her to understand the theme, moral, or point of the story. However, because of The Healer’s lack of a straightforward plot, there is no straightforward allegorical connection, and therefore no obvious theme. The combination of a disorienting plot, lack of easily recognizable real-world connection and no content that seems to be the point of the story plays an important part in confusing and alienating the reader.

Like the reader, the characters in The Healer are alienated or alone in the society they live in. Two of these alienated characters are Ice Girl and Fire Girl. Right from the very beginning, they are described as “mutants” (Bender 1). Aside from this, both Ice Girl and Fire Girl are very closed about their feelings and emotions, which leads to a lack of positive and beneficial relationships with others, which is shown as Lisa describes Fire Girl as walking home alone (Bender 2), and when Ice Girl says she “feels ice” (Bender 8). Fire Girl’s being alone is an obvious indication of her alienation in society. It shows that she has no real friends, and so she has no one to talk or discuss her feelings with. This is massive in being alienated- being alone and isolated. Ice Girl is also seemingly isolated. Her saying she feels nothing, only ice (Bender 8), gives off the connotation of cold and sad, and the fact that there’s ice makes Ice Girl’s feelings seem desolate and inhabitable, like some far-away place. Both Ice Girl and Fire Girl are seem alienated in the story.

Roy is another character who is alienated in society The Healer. This is evidenced when Lisa first meets him in the boy’s bathroom (Bender 3). Roy skips school often, and him cutting his skin is another reason that he doesn’t seem normal. Skipping school, and especially cutting, would likely mean that he’s alone, and isolated. The fact that he’s resorted to cutting himself means he is probably an outcast in society, and this combined with his skipping school, means that he certainly has few, or perhaps zero, friends or companions, which definitely would lead to him feeling alienated. Bender definitely created characters that were outcasts in society, and seem like they are alienated and alone.

Because both the characters and the reader are alienated, The Healer allows readers to connect with the characters very easily because they share the same trait of being alienated. While The Healer doesn’t have many things that are easy to connect to, and though even the characters might seem strange and confusing at first, it is the characters’ alienation in the story that makes them relatable. The reader, as previously discussed, feels confused and alone while reading the book, and a big part of that is the fact that the story is so confusing, and there’s nothing to connect to. So, when the reader sees the characters isolated and alone in society the same way that he or she is alienated while reading the story, the character might more easily connect to those characters, because, unlike much of the story, the idea of alienation is, due to Bender’s writing, one that the reader can readily connect with.

Because the reader can connect to the characters in the story, they can more easily understand the alienation-based themes that the characters present in the story.

The characters are the agent in The Healer that reveals the themes of the book. Each character has a theme or multiple themes that they show to the reader based on their individual and unique situation in the book, but all stem from the characters’ connecting trait of alienation. The problems and alienation of characters like Fire Girl, Ice Girl and Roy means that they show a reader that the opposite is good, because few readers would want to be in the situations of many of these characters. Roy, for example, is alone, and hurting himself even though he knows it’s bad for him. This would, perhaps, give the reader a lesson in the value of friendships, as Roy is alone and isolated, and also the value of self-esteem and pride, which would stem from seeing Roy cutting himself, which is obviously a sign of his unhappiness, especially because he does this knowing full well that it is hurting him.

The reader can also connect to Ice Girl’s alienation, which holds more themes. We see that she is an internal character that doesn’t show much emotion, and, like Roy, seems to be alone and not social. The reader might connect to this because the reader, throughout the book, is also left alone, as there is little to connect to. This would allow the reader to have a more complete understanding of Ice Girl’s position. From Ice Girl’s lack of socializing and communication, we might see the value of friendship, relationships with others, and the value of expressing one’s self and one’s emotions. These are all valuable themes that the reader gets by connecting to Ice Girl’s alienation through the reader’s own alienation.

Some might say that these themes would be recognizable without having to be first isolated by the story. Indeed, this might be true, as the themes are fairly obvious in the characters. It seems pretty obvious to a reader that Roy would be better off not cutting himself and having friends, and Ice Girl should probably share her emotions with others. These themes would likely be noticed by the reader without the reader being alienated first.

However, the themes of the book would mean little to the reader who cannot relate to what the themes mean. Yes, the reader might understand that friends are a good thing, or maybe only that cutting is bad. But the reader who doesn’t connect to what that means, at its core, for a person in the position of Roy, won’t get the full, complex theme that is shown by Roy. The ideas of having relationships, friends, and something that you can rely on in general, is far more applicable to the reader who has had to read an entire story not being able to connect to anything. This would make the reader understand more of the position Roy is in, how it connects to the position the reader was in, and therefore the value of the theme itself. The fact that the reader can connect to the characters that show the themes is vital to the reader having a deep and complex understanding of the theme, rather than a weak and petty understanding.

Aimee Bender masterfully connects the reader and the theme-bearing characters by alienating the characters in the story and the reader in her writing. Although the story alone gives little to connect to, because both reader and character are alienated in one place, the story, the reader can easily connect to the characters, which give the reader not just the themes themselves, but gives understanding, insight, value, and meaning to the complex themes in the story.

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Text Explorations

1.      Page 34. In this part of the text, the narrator is talking to Ice Girl. After, the narrator discusses the consequences of Ice Girl’s leaving.

“I guess I never told you, she said, but I feel nothing. I just feel ice¹. I nodded. I wasn’t surprised². She turned a bit³. I’m off now, she said, bye⁴.”

1: I think this part of the quote is a great example of how the characters can be relatable if the reader is alienated in the story. Here, Ice Girl is saying that all she feels is ice. This might not seem too significant in the scope of the entire story if the story was more relatable by itself to the average reader. Sure, the reader might recognize that this is kind of sad, but it wouldn’t be too meaningful, I don’t think. However, if a reader is alienated, it starts to become more meaningful. When you can’t connect to anything in the story, you start to feel alone, and kind of worried and nervous; nothing makes any sense. I think the fact that Ice Girl says she feels ice is massively important to the theme in the book of being alone vs. having friendships or relationships. Ice has the connotation of being cold, and ice, rather than snow, implies more of a desolate place, with few other people. For a reader reading this book, that’s what most of the book feels like. It’s hard to understand. There are few connections and not much is sensible or meaningful, seemingly. But because that’s how the reader feels, the reader can more readily connect to characters like Ice Girl, who are themselves alienated in the story, but also show themes of the book.

2: Whereas #1 may have showed how the alienation of characters and reader show themes, I  think #2 starts more of how the reader becomes alienated in the story. The narrator, who we already know to be sort of crazy and strange, is saying that she somehow understood Ice Girl’s feelings. Now, this by itself isn’t altogether so impossible or strange, being that the narrator spent so much time with Ice Girl and Fire Girl throughout the text. However, it may be confusing for a reader because of the things Ice Girl reveals she is feeling. The Ice Girl says she feels “like ice”. The narrator, though, is not nearly in as bad of a place as Ice Girl mentally or socially. Since the narrator is a normal human, with what seems like at least fair relationships with classmates and others, whereas Ice Girl is more of an alien, being mutant and also very internal about her feelings and also not having many friends. So, where would the narrator base her assumptions off of? How would she understand in the slightest the feelings of Ice Girl when they come from such different places? Things like this are what come as confusing to the reader- things that don’t seem like they’re altogether useful or explained.

3: I think this isn’t hugely important, but it kind of shows Ice Girl in a way that demonstrates why she’s alienated in society in the story. She’s hugely dismissive and not very communicative, doesn’t have many friends, if any at all, and doesn’t show her feelings. This is one of the first times in the story where Ice Girl displays any feelings (she even says “I guess I never told you”), and right after that, she doesn’t get into deep conversation at all with the narrator. She just turns, and abruptly prepares to leave. These qualities make Ice Girl alienated in society not because of her deeds, which is more like Fire Girl, but because of herself. She isolates herself, and makes herself cut off, which is basically self-alienation. However, we must remember that as #1 discusses, this plays a vital role in channeling the themes through the characters’ isolation to the readers’ isolation/alienation.

4: This is another prime example of the confusion that often erupts in the plot. Ice Girl, who is a key character throughout literally the entire story up to this point, decides that she’s just going to go and leave the town. This is made more confusing by the beginning of the book where the narrator says “Our town was ringed by a circle of hills and because of this no one really came in and no one ever left”. As if leaving this town was already a strange thing, Ice Girl decides that she can just abruptly leave, without talking about it, and just like that, be gone for the rest of the story. This alienates readers further because they had previously been starting to connect to Ice Girl through her alienation, but her sudden exit leaves readers even more confused. A side note to this is the dismissiveness in Ice Girl. The narrator is likely, as far as we know, one of the people closest to Ice Girl, and the only thing Ice Girl says to the narrator is “I’m going now, bye.” This is adding on to #3, where we see a lot of Ice Girl’s qualities that show her to be so isolated and cold- another reason why she is probably “Ice” girl, she is the cold one, whereas Fire Girl is the one who is always taking action and heated and lively, even if perhaps in a negative way.

2.      

      Page 29. In this part of the text, the narrator was first describing Roy, who ended up befriending Fire Girl. Afterwards, the narrator discusses Roy’s relationship with Fire Girl.

“[Roy] was very rarely at school and he was a cutter¹. He cut things into his skin with a razor blade. I saw once; some Saturday when everyone was at a Picnic and I was bored, I wandered into the boys’ bathroom² and he was in there and he showed me how he carved letters into his skin³. He’d spelled out OUCH on his leg.⁴”

1: This start is already alienating the reader by introducing a new character who is, by his qualities alone, very hard to relate to. This immediately is confusing the reader, and alienating him/her because the reader is unlikely to have encountered someone like this, and even if they have, it’s still an unsettling character, one with clearly many problems. So, this is another fine example of how the reader can become alienated in the text, in this case, through the character and his characteristics. This confusion, though, does mean that if the reader does so wish, he/she might be able to connect to Roy more easily than if the text was more easily understood, because they are alike in the way that they are both isolated in the story (for Roy) or in the book itself (for the reader).

2: If #1 wasn’t unsettling enough, the reader will certainly be a little confused after this. The narrator calmly, like it was an everyday things, discusses how she got bored, and in order to stop the boredom, decided to wander into the boy’s bathroom. Not only is the action strange, but the pure calmness and tone of the narrator discussing this is not only confusing and alien for a reader expecting a short story with simple connections to the average person’s world, but it is also, in a sense, scary. If a reader was expecting something different, but was hit with a tale as strange as this in the midst of an already confusing book, the reader starts to doubt what he/she is reading, and her comprehension of the book. However, I think this is very much intentional- because as the reader meets more of these strange characters, making him/her feel more isolated, cold, and alone, those very same strange characters become more relatable for the reader as he/she starts to realize that these characters’ situations are similar in some ways to the readers’ situation when reading the book.

3: As a continuation of #1 and #2, this tale given by the narrator becomes more confusing. In a way, this is a combination of #1 and #2. A boy who is a cutter, who likely is an outcast in society with few social relationships, as he never comes to school, sees a random girl walk into the boy’s bathroom, and his first idea is to explain to her how he does these bad things to himself to the person who walked into the wrong bathroom. Again, as the book continuously shows, this is in no way normal! It’s very strange and confusing. This also shows another aspect that troubles the status quo of a simple short story/allegory that’s easy to understand. The Healer is not like that for the confused reader. And one reason why is a huge lack of continuity in the plot. There’s no flow or progression of ideas whatsoever. At the beginning, it seems like an allegory with “Fire Girl” and “Ice Girl”. But skip a page or two and you’ve got a cutter and a girl walking into the boy’s bathroom, and the cutter is telling the girl how he cuts himself. In the end, or near the part where Ice Girl leaves and you have many characters, including Roy and Ice Girl, having left or about to leave, Fire Girl is blamed for all the town’s problems, etc. If a reader came into this book expecting to draw easy comparisons or connections from this book to their world, they were likely very surprised at what they found, and this is a huge reason in why the reader gets alienated and confused so drastically in this text.

4: I think the fact that Roy spells out “OUCH” on his leg is significant, especially if a reader can connect to it later on in the story. Normally a reader might identify this as a product of Roy’s cutting, which is in part, of course, true, but I think it goes further. Ouch is basically an exclamation of some amount of pain, though I don’t think that massive amounts of pain being inflicted would have the person in pain say “ouch”, so I would say it’s reserved for less amounts of pain. It indicates sadness (you don’t want to be hurt, usually), and in Roy’s case, it sort of shows a deeper sadness and conflict- he seems to know that the cutting hurts, yet he willingly does it and tells others how to. So, to the reader who can connect to the text, if they see their alienation as a means of connection to deeper themes, I think this can, to them, connect to the ideas of friendship, solidarity, and suffering in a deeper way than to the reader who just sees Roy as another confusing part of an increasingly confusing text. Roy is, for the reader who can better connect to him, an agent of those themes, bringing them to the reader, which is, I think, Bender’s purpose in having such strange characters.

3.      

      Page 27. This is the very beginning of the story, so nothing has happened before it, but after, the story goes on to discuss how Ice Girl and Fire Girl’s relationship began to break apart.

“There were two mutant girls in the town¹: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice². Everyone else’s hands were normal³.”

1: The story starts off describing two of the main characters, and sort of the setting. We now understand that there are two mutant girls in a town. This seems like a pretty normal opening, and the reader wouldn’t be at all surprised by this. This seems like, and for a couple of paragraphs more will continue to seem like a normal short story. Indeed, the reader might make some early assumptions on themes or ideas- we have two girls at least that are being described as “mutant”, which would imply they aren’t only “different”, but in some way alien. So there might be, so it seems, themes of reacting/responding to being different.

2: This makes the story seem like it’s taking an allegorical turn- the “fire” and “ice” hands are what make the girls mutants, and of course humans have many associations with fire and ice- they are opposites, they cancel each other out/create something new (water or steam, etc.), and the characteristics of a person with a hand of fire would likely contrast the person with the hand of ice. So, the beginning of the story is definitely setting the reader up to believe that the story is an allegory of some sort, and the Ice Girl and Fire Girl seem to be some of the symbolism in the text. A reader would probably start looking for themes and connections within the plot as it continues, expecting this from an allegory. Obviously, we know that it is indeed far more complex than an allegory, so the assumption that the story is an allegory will in part lead to the alienation of the reader and his/her confusion with the text.

3: I think this part of this small passage is important as well to the hoax of the story being an allegory. It seems pretty cliché, because you have the outcasts, the “mutants” as they were called, in a society of normal people. This kind of allegorical theme in general is another way that Aimee Bender seems to be tricking the reader into thinking this is an allegory. But other than that trickery which has been noted several times, I think this idea that everyone else’s hands were normal is interesting. The narrator constantly refers to her “normal” hand, like on page 28, when she imagines that J., the “speechwriter”, and the only person to leave the town up to that point, would make speeches that referred to her as “Lisa with the two flesh hands.” It’s interesting that the author would refer to this so often, and it could be that this isn’t only the “allegorical” or “basic” theme of differences in society that a reader might immediately expect; but perhaps it looks deeper into other themes of the characteristics of differences and how they affect the nature of society, because Lisa, the narrator, seems like she almost wants to be different, as the society is, though the important characters, pretty much carbon copies of a normal human.

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.

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.            

Text Exploration/"The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn't Flash Red Anymore" by Sherman Alexie

Page 46. This happens as Victor, the narrator, begins to discuss his time playing basketball after seeing Julius go past. After this, he thinks about how he lost his edge and “feeling of immortality”.

“It’s that need to be the best¹, that feeling of immortality, that drives a ballplayer². And when it disappears, for whatever reason, that ballplayer is never the same person³, on or off the court⁴.”

1: Alexie discussing the Native American boys’ drive to win and be the best is an immediate contradiction to many stereotypes. It shows that the Native Americans weren’t just lazy and doing nothing in their poor reservations, as is a common stereotype of them. It shows that they have ambition and desire too, in the form of basketball. Adding on to this, this is an extremely relatable feeling, and it’s also very human. Especially when people are younger, wanting to win and be the best is a very common trait, so this essentially has Alexie immediately having connections created between “outsiders” to Native American communities by using a common trait between many humans in the desire to be the best, and not to mention Basketball, one of the more popular sports, especially in the United States, creating more connections. This is important because it shows Alexie isn’t trying to alienate the reader completely; indeed, he is showing a strange place for many people, but in a semi-familiar way and, perhaps more importantly, is contrasting many stereotypes.

2: Similarly to number one, a feeling of immortality isn’t altogether rare in humans. This creates further connections to the reader. This is interesting, though, for more than the connections to the reader. Having a feeling of immortality is more than just a feeling- it’s one of feeling very good about yourself. This, I think, shows Alexie trying to show that even though the reservation is an awful place, as he showed earlier in the text, the Native Americans are capable of making the best out of it, and sometimes they feel great when they’re doing things they want to do, instead of sulking around in the reservation doing nothing all the time. Especially when compared to the rest of the text, I think that this is an example of Alexie showing the different aspects of Native American life, and trying to distance his book further from stereotypes.

3: Firstly, Alexie is deliberately describing that Native Americans can have personalities that are subject to change, like any other person’s. He is saying that Native American life isn’t a monotone, always going steadily, not up or down. Indeed, it is complex and changing, just like the average human. This, again, is another time where Alexie tries to give the reader some aspects of life that are really relatable, to combine with the parts of the Native American experience that aren’t relatable. Furthermore, the narrative style of the book is interesting. Victor’s (the narrator) thoughts are being directed at the reader, as if he was talking to the reader, which means that Alexie is trying to drive home the thought into the reader by having the reader be spoken to by Victor’s thoughts. This, I think, is an emphasis of all the things that Alexie wants to see in this passage, because the reader is being directly addressed by the thoughts, making him/her pay attention more carefully, and therefore having the reader take in the information more easily.

4: To me, this, I think, was trying to avoid more stereotypes: Saying that the Native American ballplayers change “on and off the court” is explicitly showing that Native Americans aren’t defined by basketball either- they don’t exist in one form only, as many stereotypes might define them (eg. They are only basketball players, or they only sit on the reservation doing nothing, or they are only alcoholics). Alexie is showing the Native American people doing a variety of things, so that they can be seen as more human, with different interests and habits and hobbies. This creates a more relatable, and perhaps realistic, image of Native Americans in the mind of the reader; so that the reader isn’t blinded by stereotypes as they read the story.