CART211: Week Five

Response:

This is my second reading of The Garden of Forking Paths, and I found it refreshing to have forgotten it enough so that it could surprise me again.

What I found interesting this time around was how the stories nested within each other. There is a stream of consciousness that leaves out important links between different elements (much like the omission of time in the Garden of Forking Paths within the Garden of Forking Paths), the narrator presents his driving forces then glides over them until they are suddenly resolved in the last paragraphs. There is a disconnect between the narrator’s described experiences and his outward actions that is unsettling, but highlights the idea of a piece of literature as a maze where one of many futures takes place. Being loose pages, essentially the story itself could have been just one of the many forking paths of the garden.

The missing beginning created an interesting inertia where it took longer to piece together the person and the problem. I’ve found there are a few movies and games that are more interesting if one misses the first few minutes where they usually set up the entire story and introduce all the characters and their paths.
The image of the infinite labyrinths was very compelling. A very fractal country side.

The labyrinth that would “encompass the past and future”(32) that Dr. Yu Tsun describes while walking to Dr. Stephen Albert’s house, is interesting to compare to Yu’s self-imposed “future as irrevocable as the past”(31). I’m still not very sure where those two concepts match up.