Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Imagining Other People
Something that we discussed in class today had me thinking about the way we, as the reader approach certain literary works such as What is the What. One question that had us stuck was something that the professor asked us. How do we imagine other people? It's a very difficult thing to do because you will have to imagine everything about them yet you do not know their story. How does a person sympathize with others with just a few hints about them. Just utilizing certain things that we see but their just assumptions. Just like Valentino and how he imagines and sympathizes with TV boy without actually having a conversation with him. Valentino just analyzes the situation and imagines TV boy's life through his own experiences as a soldier boy and assumes it's the same life experience. How do we acquire the skill of imagining other people when we know nothing about them?
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I think that this skill is something that can be developed. I think that this is the whole point of the gesture that we keep discussing in class. This novel is a gesture that can provide the awareness required to imagine other people. All one needs to realize is that there is a world larger than oneself. Once someone has some life experience and some knowledge of the world outside of oneself, one should be able to imagine what someone else's story might be like. Valentino has no idea what the stories of the people he meets might be like, but his own experiences give him the tools with which to create some sort of framework with which to understand others. I don't believe that one needs to suffer as Valentino did in order to do this, simply having an awareness of the world is enough.
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