Final Project (ish)

I think I went about five different ways with this project before I finally settled on my current idea, which hopefully will be the one I actually use.

Basically, I'm going to be extremely pretentious and try to write Signs and Symbols from the boy's point of view. I'm 90% certain that I'll do this via two different "diaries." One will be the boy's psychiatrist's notes, which would be a hyper-realistic interpretation of events, and the other will be the boy's supposed diary, which would be a mythologized interpretation of those same events. Because of referential mania, the diary might have to just be the boy's internal monologue. I'm reading and re-reading Nabokov to see if the boy would maybe have been okay with a blank book that he could put his own things in. Perhaps I'll just have to take some artistic license.

Anyway, the main focus of my version of the story is somewhat along the lines of the idea I presented in my last blog post. I also read Joe Schadt's post from the 15th of last month, per Megan's suggestion, and I'm going to incorporate the converse of Joe's idea, that life is a form of death. Death is a form of life, answers are a form of death--it's getting a little mind-twisty at this point, so I'll have to hash that out further in my own head before I try to put it on paper, or worse still, the internet. I may end up making another blog post tomorrow, especially if I have another particularly enlightening lunch hour with my friend.

Before I get into that too much, though, there's the more fundamental issue of what death is. To look into that, still in the context of a story, I'm going to draw on Eliade Chapter 5 (ascent--so for me, death as a magical ascension), Frye Chapter 5 (also ascent), Gilgamesh, Icarus, and probably several others. I want to look into the idea of a cipher, with all the meanings attached thereto, and the numbers Nabokov uses; do they form a pattern, are they some sort of cipher? In honor of Nabokov, there will probably be an anagram at some point as well.

Most of this is going to be all but unrecognizable once it gets into a story, I think, so I'll put the actual analytical bits that I've talked about here into an explication, which might actually just end up confusing the issue even further, now that I think about it. I guess we'll see how that goes. If nothing else, it can be a window into my thought processes and hopefully will provide some sort of clarity in that way.

So there in a nutshell is the fundamental idea for my final project. As I said, I'll probably amend it tomorrow (Tuesday), but for now, this is where I'm going.