Blog Post 11/26

1a) “I find people confusing….The first main reason is that people do a lot of talking without using any words.” (14 Haddon). 

1b) “(Temple Grandin) is now aware of the existence of those social signals.  She can infer them, she says, but she herself cannot perceive them, cannot participate in this magical communication directly, or conceive of the many-leveled, kaleidoscopic states of mind behind it” (197, Zunshine). 

2)         How does the first-person storytelling of Persepolis and The Curious Incident differ to better accommodate the events in the novel?

3)         Reading both Persepolis and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in a row, it is clear that both deviate from common literary storytelling devices.  While both texts uses unconventional devices to tell a story, Persepolis manages to maintain a more “coherent” story throughout the novel.  This is mainly due to the fact that Satrapi allows herself to describe how the other characters, besides her, react to the situations around her.  She is, more or less, aware of her environment to the point where she can aptly describe the situation through picture or text.  With Curious Incident, Mark Haddon’s use of the first person perspective through the eyes of a person with these “difficulties”, ones that often associated with autism, allows this story with a more “narrow” view of the environment this story takes place.

            As I started to find topics for my final paper, Liza Zunshine’s “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness” provides a “scientific” approach to how autistic people have trouble comprehending fictional stories due to the fact that they are unable to “mind-read” people’s actions.  Zunshine uses Temple Grandin as an example of she was unable to read “social signals”, a problem that the main character, Christopher, often face in the novel.  The novel’s unusual, often cryptic, pace left me in the dark in numerous occasions, mainly due to the fact that Christopher’s retelling of his experiences were often the opposite of what I expected.  Like Persepolis though, both novels dealt with describe minute details that wouldn’t usually be in “ordinary” literary texts.  Persepolis allows the drawings to convey the details, where Curious Incident uses Christopher’s uncanny attention to detail to express these small moments.