I used to be the biggest reader in the world, at least on fiction. Today I still read a lot but much more non-fiction and news articles rather than books and stories. I took Studies in Literature this year because I didn’t think there was a big difference between reading fiction and reading non fiction. In my mind a book words were words and no matter genre of literature I read, I would still get better a reading. What I thought has some truth, no matter what you read, you will always gain something. However, looking back now I softly laugh at myself, how ridiculous was it for me to think fiction and nonfiction were similar in writing style and purpose? Fiction has also helped me understand my world not just through facts and references on history, but also theoretically. Books can help you reflect and look deeper into yourself as well as the world you live in. In other words, books have helped me to better understand myself and my environment. Reading Reading Othello, The Sense of an Ending, and a short passage from Mrs. Dempster’s has made me realize that I am a problem solver who likes to put information together in order to understand the big picture.
First, Othello is a famous and admired play by Shakespeare. Othello was the first piece of literature that made me realize my passion to problem solve. The most important and prominent character in the play is Iago. Iago’s character can be described as a mixture of a master magician, manipulative mastermind, and devil. Iago is able to shatter Othello’s life through doubting and convincing Othello that his wife is cheating on him. As much as I liked the character Iago, I kept wondering how Iago could have so much luck? The timing of all the characters such as Desdemona, Roderigo, and Emilia walking in on each other and saying the exact words in favor of Iago, is unrealistic. And no one ever questions Iago and simply believes him! This is something that I could not wrap my head around. How could a person get this much luck? And if Shakespeare is known to write realistic characters then why would he write such a story filled with such unrealistic events? There are many way in which you can tackle this questions but the one that I kept coming back to was this idea of the audience not having the full story. Iago must have done some side work of which we do not know of. There must have been side stories and characters that influenced Othello or Desdemona. We will never know the missing puzzle pieces that led to Iago’s luck but there must have been. The play of Othello therefore meant, at least to me that, individuals cannot and will not know every detail that leads up to the present. We can all make assumptions and piece together Iago’s success with what we know but we probably are incorrect in our assumption because we cannot and never will get the full story. This is a reflection of reality and how we can never really know why a person does something, or gains something, human destinies are all too complicated and intricate. This was the conclusion I came to after reading Othello. And it’s quite ironic because I concluded that we can never be sure of our conclusions. Nonetheless, this idea came only after long extensive thought with bristle boards and a mind map I lay out on my living room floor. There have been very few times where I had been really determined to piece together a story.
Secondly, The Sense of an Ending is a story full of ambiguity. As you can guess, the book made me more anxious to finish the book so I could see the picture. Why was Veronica so upset with Tony? Why did Adrian kill himself? And just when you think you’ve figured it all out, you don’t. The man Tony suspects it Veronica’s son is not actually her’s but of her mother’s and Adrian’s. Just how can you expect something like that. As soon as I read this I wanted to see go and reread the clues that Tony had given us. I was determined to figure out the countless why’s and how’s of this unexpected realization. What had I missed and how could I have interpreted the letters from Veronica differently? Unfortunately, there are many unanswered questions. Besides the equation in Adrian’s diary, the letters, and some foggy memories from Tony’s mind, there was nothing else for me to put together. A connection at saw between Othello and The Sense of an Ending is that similarly to how we will never know the backstories in Othello, Tony will never know the backstory to Adrian, Veronica, and Sarah’s(Veronica’s mother) life. The path that led to Adrian’s suicide is not one even Tony completely understand because as the reader, we only walk the path of Tony’s and see what Tony see’s. In short, Tony was much more of a person than a character trying to figure things. He was trying to figure out Adrian just as much as we were.
The story of Fifth Business is an interesting one because unlike the other two stories, I only read a passage from this book. Although I had information from a snippet of the story, I could still get a good understanding of who Mrs. Dempster, Percy, Dunstan were. What is really helpful is that despite the story being told from Dunstan’s perspective, he is much like a narrator describing another story of Mr and Mrs. Dempster’s evening walk. Eventually the his life and the Dempster’s life collide and the information presented to us is very clear and unbiased. There are many factual aspects in the passage. It’s often something we don’t think about but I realized how aware and conscious I was of all the information. I found myself in the midst of piecing together information.
To conclude, Othello, The Sense of an Ending, and a short passage from Mrs. Dempster’s made me realize that I can be a hardcore problem solver. But something else my discovery of problem seeking has also taught me is how capable I am of getting invested into something. This is a new discovery for me that will probably have good and bad connotation for me in the future.
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