9/28/2009
In reading Sleepwalk, I found myself digging into the grittiness, lonesomeness, depression, and overall grim nature of the text. It is not that I enjoy all of these qualities, but it was the way the author used all them in his text to show us the true reality of the society that we all are living in. Tomine simply uses his storytelling, I feel, to reciprocate his notion of a grim, isolated society. For example, one of my favorite stories in Sleepwalk is when the blind man befriends the employee at the grocery store, only for her to completely ignore him while he walks past her at the end of the story. For me, this conveyed such a strong notion of "we are all alone".
--What reality does Tomine wish to create for his audience/readers?
I felt such an incredible feeling of isolation while reading these stories, which leads me to believe Tomine does not wish happy endings upon us, for society does not supply us with those. The reality in which he portrays is "dog eat dog", grim, and depressing. I wouldn't say his reality has very much cheer in it. I would instead say that he wishes us all to act indepdentally of one another and do what WE AS AN INDIVIDUAL feel is right (not what society tells us is okay).
When connecting Sleepwalk with White's article I found a phrase in my notes that I find perfect for this posting: "Reality itself has no meaning, but can be molded into different meanings". While it is a natural occurrence for us as humans to tell stories, I believe that Tomine does such a wonderful job of not just relaying any message to us, but shows us that there are deep, underlying messages in any one story. The reality of the stories in Sleepwalk, for instance, have no specific meaning until you mold your own reality of the world that you find yourself living in to be similar to what you are reading (or at least not very far from it).
Not only does Sleepwalk deal with our dark secrets and touch base with some underlying emotions, but it grips us into a cold reality that we cannot get away from. A reality in which we are all living in and a society that we are being consumed into. I for one believe Tomine is dead on with this pressumption of reality and that we all can take something out of at least one of his stories.
Thanks for reading :)
Brittany Janning
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I found Tomine's work to be boring and run of the mill. Maybe I just am that much of a cynic. I think that Tomine did a good job of showing the many ways in which isolation takes form, but I don't think he had anything to say that hadn't already been said before.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed Tomine very much, and also found the isolation to work powerfully within his work. I'm glad that you represent that here. But, for many stories we don't necessarily have endings so much as brief testaments to life. He just chooses the snippets that represent the emotion that he is trying to create. Is that what you are getting at here? Or are you saying that Tomine thinks that all life is lonely?
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