Sunday, February 8, 2009

I just finished reading The Garden of Forking Paths and having already read it previously in a literary sense, I am now trying to look at it in terms of presenting a story through various mediums. The story itself is fairly straightforward (as well as completely unbelievable) but the ideas about infinite time and unending novels in which characters make not one choice but all choices, fits in perfectly with the internet and the infinite capacity to click on links and be continually transported. What really works for the story is the fact that it is one filled with so many important choices that the narrator must make: where to go when he knows his life is endanger, how to communicate his information to the Germans, whether or not to kill Mr. Albert, the man who knows so much about his ancestry, and so on. Because these choices are so pivotal, it makes it all the more interesting to think about what would happen if they were made differently, if all the possibilities were explored, if the narrator could, as in his ancestor's novel, make every choice.

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