Final Project Part 2

I don't think I'm going to write what most would consider a proper explication for my short story. Mainly I'll just rephrase what I said in class after I presented, because I think anything more would be death by over-analysis.

Essentially, I thought about Nabokov's story from a different perspective than most analyses endorse. What if, for the boy in the story, death is really a form of release? What if he, like the little fledgling bird dying in the puddle, is so tormented by life that he would actually welcome death? This does seem to be the case in the story, given that the boy tries to take his own life several times.

As I was thinking about the directions I wanted to go with the story, I thought back to the essay I'd written on how the past possesses the present in Nabokov and how I'd related Gilgamesh to the boy. For those of you who are less familiar with the story, the horrifically oversimplified gist of it is that Gilgamesh loses his best friend, goes to find eternal life, loses eternal life, and realizes that he didn't really want eternal life in the first place. The actual story, which you can read here, is obviously far more complicated than that.

In the written version of my story, which I as yet have not satisfactorily named, I did hide some numerical references which did not come out in the spoken version. While the written version lacks some of the emotion and inflections that the spoken version had, I think the symbolism and cipher-ness of the story comes out much better in writing.

Correlation vs. Causation

I was thinking about this a lot this past week for some reason, probably because my final project was regarding referential mania, which is really just the creation of imaginary causal links (or a version of paranoid schizophrenia if you're into that lingo). I also was reading some religious articles over the weekend, and it occurred to me that a lot of them used correlation and causation interchangeably. I'm not saying all religion does that, but this particular set of articles was about how if you thank God for something good that happens, good things will keep happening to you. I'm not saying that this is never the case; maybe God really does reward you for thanking him. I don't pretend to know. I just think that a lot of these very well-meaning people mistake correlation for causation. Just because you thanked God and then something good happened doesn't mean your thanking God caused that good thing to happen.

And that's all I have to say about that.