Ambiguity, defined as “capable of being understood in two or more possible senses or ways” (Merriam Webster), is one of the key elements of modern writing. In fact, Reif Larson, author of I am Radar, says “One thing I think is true about successful storytelling: There’s as much significance in what’s left out as in what’s actually said … This is really a crucial tenet of narration, perhaps the crucial tenet…” (Atlantic). This is most obvious because it forces the reader to read actively and engage with the text. However, beyond this clear usefulness authors and directors use this tool to invoke other reactions in their work, which indeed makes ambiguity’s role in narrative ambiguous itself.
In this case, a novelist uses ambiguity to engage the reader in the argument of the work, by creating an idea of choice. Then, no matter which choice the reader makes, they reach the same conclusion and will then call it their own. In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, she uses this form macroscopically in order to set up several bunches of chapters that examine the multiple ways her father could have died. Meanwhile, in A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki decides to only implement an ambiguous note when Ruth, the character, dreams after running out of words in the diary. Ozeki’s microscopic use of ambiguity challenges the difference between fact and fiction, as opposed to Bechdel’s inability to know any fact or fiction with regards to her father’s death. Both works’ ambiguity
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leads different readers down opposing lines of argument, however will ultimately find lead the readers to one, cohesive conclusion. This sort of ambiguity, named literary ambiguity as opposed to any other type, contains two steps. The first is the event, about which the ambiguity revolves. The second consists of the multiple hypotheses that the author provides to explain the event. Both authors use this same overarching idea of how literary ambiguity works; however, each author utilizes it differently. This paper will examine the role of literary ambiguity as a discussion between author and reader and its effects on the latter’s experience with the work. This form of literary ambiguity plays with the reader’s conception of time as well. In the scope of these two narratives, the model works by taking an ambiguous event in the present. The past is used to make an argument about the event. The author then uses the arguments, as stated before to come to one unanimous conclusion. A Tale for the Time Being In A Tale for the Time Being, Ozeki’s literary ambiguity is highlighted in the sections following the disappearance of the words near the end of Nao’s diary. The next day, after she dreams of Nao’s time, words have appeared. The arguments consist of Muriel and Oliver giving their opinions on what happened to the words. Ruth tells Muriel that the words in Nao’s diary were receding the night before, but after dreaming about the characters, she woke up to whole new passages written in the morning. Muriel rather explicitly demonstrates her disbelief, saying “Excuse me for asking, but have you [and Oliver] been smoking a lot of pot?” (Ozeki 375). Ruth then explains how her dream continued the story with the jungle crow leading Ruth to Nao’s father and Jiko; this results in Ruth waking up to a completely new entry into the diary. Later, Ruth continues to read, but she still hasn’t “reached the end. Every time [she opens] the diary, there are more pages … the end keeps receding, like an outgoing wave. Just out of reach. [She] can’t quite catch up” (376). Muriel responds by positing that the crow in her dreams is her totem, much as Schrodinger, the cat, is Oliver’s; and Ruth must catch up with her present before she can reach Nao’s. One section later, Oliver gives his input into what may be happening with Nao’s diary by using an example from quantum mechanics. Oliver posits that the delayed storytelling in the Diary is because there are an infinite series of possible outcomes in Nao’s time, but they have not been experienced in Ruth’s time yet (395). Furthermore, he explains that Schrodinger’s thought experiment demonstrated that macroscopic systems sometimes behave quantum mechanically, which more specifically means that their behavior relies on statistical foundations, rather than classical ones. This is represented as the superposition of an infinite number of wavefunctions. Oliver proposes that this can be interpreted as there existing an infinite number of worlds in which Ruth’s arrow of time might enter (397). The conclusion of this is that the reason Ruth could not read the remaining pages of the diary is due to something about Ruth or Nao’s realities that forced the wave function for that time to temporarily vanish. Within the scandal that words in a diary can simply appear or disappear, there is innately ambiguity. This ambiguity lives in the question of whether a reader can actually impact the course of the literary material. In answering this dilemma, Ozeki’s use of ambiguousness and its value to the author become clear. With respect to A Tale for the Time Being, both Muriel and Oliver give Ruth different answers regarding the same receding pages problem, yet both come to the same conclusion. Hence, this example fits the requirements of the overall structure of literary ambiguity. Muriel’s response begins with surprise but becomes quite spiritual. As probably most people would, she reacts to Ruth’s claim with skepticism. This reaction is due to the challenge facing ambiguity, namely that often there is a solution, which is so likely as to drive all solutions away. However, Ruth asserts that the easy answer, namely that she has been smoking pot (376), is absolutely false. The remaining situation is that there must have been some way for Ruth to impact Nao’s time. With this requirement, Muriel posits a rather spiritual hypothesis, that the crow is really a powerful being able to transcend time. Examining this deeper, in the scope of this novel the crow is not the only thing able to transcend time, but it stands alongside Nao’s diary itself. By Nao’s diary entering the ranks of powerful spirits, literature as an entire medium enters the fold. Furthermore, Muriel adds that there must also be a requirement to when time can be traversed. She proposes that in order to continue to be affected by Nao crossing the seas of time, Ruth’s time must be complete as well. This completion requirement means that Ruth must be set in her own time, and not fixated solely in that of Nao’s. By extension, for literature to affect the reader’s world, the reader must be prepared for and accepting of it. Connecting the two parts of Muriel’s suggestion, the answer to Ruth’s dilemma is revealed as it is possible for the reader to travel through time if and only if the reader’s situation in time is prepared to be guided by the book or diary. Oliver’s answer to Ruth’s question is vastly different, in that it revolves around scientific theories rather than spiritual, philosophical ones. He appeals to quantum mechanical principles in order to explain Ruth’s disappearing-page event. Rather than a crow bringing the story across time once Ruth is ready, Oliver asserts that all possible outcomes of the novel already exist, but Ruth had to wait to ‘measure’ which outcome she will experience. While Oliver throws out the notion that the story is a combination of many different individual stories, as the superposition principle of quantum mechanics would suggest, he instead posits that the possibilities collapse to one of many possible worlds. By extension, this one world has no affect on any of the other possible worlds that are not in Ruth and Oliver’s instance (Byrne), so there is no need to worry before or after the event of interference of other alternate worlds. The implication of this hypothesis is that Ruth, as an observer of the quantum mechanical behavior of Nao’s diary, is as involved in the outcome as Nao writing it. However, unlike Nao, Ruth does not know the effect she has on Nao’s story. We may extend this further, to the idea of forbidden states. These are times in which the wave function would go to zero, meaning that there is no possibility of the story being told at that particular moment in time. If Ruth and the diary were expressed mathematically, their wave function would be zero before Ruth’s dream, since there were no words at the end of the diary, and non-zero afterwards. And while it would be impossible to write a closed form solution to this, we know that somehow the dream changed the literary wavefunction in Oliver’s theory. Now, it is clear that the literary ambiguity of Nao’s diary changing fits the structure proposed in this paper.
It has already been shown that Ozeki uses two arguments, which respond to the same ambiguous event, to assert that through some, unknown mechanism the reader’s condition while examining the literature influences the outcome of the material. Literary ambiguity, therefore, relies on the idea that it does not matter which hypothesis is correct, because the answers point to the same
outcome. Fun Home Unlike Ozeki, Bechdel uses literary ambiguity to establish an overarching theme for the narrative, rather than simply one section thereof. This leads to the narrator posing the two hypotheses regarding the death of Alison’s father, as opposed to two characters essentially having a conversation. Two moments in Fun Home describe the story’s ambiguity greatest. In fact, they both describe her father’s death, but at different points in the tragicomic. The first is early in the novel, when we first learn that he had died, followed by when Bechdel offers a different, but equally likely scenario regarding the death.
Every family has secrets. Taboo secrets are typically the one's we'd like to keep hidden the most. Unfortunately, what's done in the dark always finds itself resurfacing to the light. In Allison Bechdel "Fun Home", she recollects the memories that impacted her life the most when she was in the stage of discovering her true self. The memories we remember the most tend to play a major role in our life development. For Allison, one well-kept secret that her father contained well from her, unraveled many memories of the truth that laid before her eyes.
conduct themselves distinctly. Evil and wicked people tends to hurt and harm others with no
Moral ambiguity is lack of clarity in decision making. Basically, moral ambiguity is when you have an issue, situation, or question that has moral or ethical elements, but the morally correct action to take is unclear, due to conflicting. The author of The Kite Runner is Khaled Hosseini, the book is about a boy named Amir and how much of a easy life he has at first, but near the middle of the book his life is horrible from there to the end of the book.
Throughout chapter one of Fun Home, Alison Bechdel portrays artifice and art as two very similar but distinct things; both overlapping and making it hard to differentiate between what is what. Art, in her view, is the truth, and a skill that has to be mastered. On the other hand, artifice contains partial, or full, amounts of falsehood; it covers up the truth in some way but contains art in itself. Artifice can be, like art, something mastered, but can also be a coping mechanism to cover up something good or bad. Bechdel turns both art and artifice into a very interlinked, combined, version of the two forms. When truth and falsehood are combined, after awhile, it becomes a challenge to distinguish between the two; evidently true to herself.
We come into this world like a ball of clay ready to be molded into a work of art. Our parents are often our biggest influences. We often learn our values and morals from our parents. Our temperament and what we learn is acceptable in terms of our behavior is learned and molded by our environment. If we are raised by well adjusted stable parents, we have an easier time adjusting to the adult world. When we are raised by someone who has unresolved personal issues from their past or has a personality disorder it is only then when the ball of clay can become a distorted version of its intended vision.
In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Bechdel uses the theme of appearance versus reality to highlight her relationship with her father. Bechdel utilizes her illustrations and short sentences to reveal these things about herself and her father. Bechdel opens her memoir with a chapter entitled “Old Father, Old Artificer”. Bechdel refers to her father, Bruce Bechdel, as an artificer because she sees him as a skilled craftsman. Bechdel describes, “His greatest achievement, arguably, was his monomaniacal restoration of our old house.” (Bechdel 4). Her father restored their old house to make it look like a huge mansion. Bechdel knows that this is just the appearance of their household because it is not an accurate representation of their family life inside the house. Bruce created an appearance that was the opposite of reality to cover up the actual wealth of their family. He hides the fact that his family may not be as wealthy and perfect as they appear to be. In this case, Bruce reveals he believes that appearance is more important than the reality of a situation. Appearance is also important on the inside of the home as well. Bechdel mentions, “Sometimes, when things were going well, I
Domestic violence is a vicious cycle; one parent abuses their child, their child grows up and abuses their child, and the cycle continues until someone decides to break it. Sometimes domestic violence takes many generations before someone decides to stop the cycle. The parent who breaks the cycle wants a better life for their child than what they had. For most parents this is the ultimate goal of raising children, giving them a better world than the one you had because parents typically want the best for their children. In Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Bruce Bechdel wants his daughter to be the opposite of him. He wants her to be a heterosexual woman but once it is clear
William Faulkner loves to keep the reader guessing. One of his favorite narrative techniques is to hint at a topic and raise questions and then leave the reader dangling. We are left with a void which we can not fill. The questions that the reader is left with will eventually be answered, but the reader will find the answers before Faulkner comes out and states what is by then the obvious. A good example is in As I Lay Dying where understanding the significance of Jewel is a major part of understanding the story.
It is said that fiction is an essentially rhetorical art and that the author tries to persuade the reader towards a specific view of the world while reading. This is evident in both short stories, A Secret Lost in the Water by Roch Carrier, and He-y Come on Ou-t by Shinichi Hoshi. Although through A Secret Lost in the Water, Roch Carrier displays how fiction is an essentially rhetorical art better than Shinichi Hoshi in He-y, Come on Ou-t (awkard sentence), Shinichi Hoshi demonstrates it better through the use of prognosis. Furthermore, by utilizing the characters, such as the farmer from A Secret Lost in the Water, and the use of symbolism such as the hole from He-y, Come on Ou-t, it is evident that the author makes an endeavour towards persuading
The reader's experience of ambiguity in Obasan begins with the poetically-charged proem, preceding chapter one, which opens with these words:
In The Monument by Elizabeth Bishop ambiguity is crucial to the audience's perception of the monument. Bishop refrains from telling the audience the meaning of the monument in order to maintain the theme of ambiguity. By using ambiguity Bishop allows her audience to develop their own interpretation of the monument.
Douglas Light said that our imagination is better than any answer to a question. Light distinguished between two genres: fantasy from fiction. He described how fantasy stimulates one’s imagination, which is more appealing, but fiction can just be a relatable story. In the same way, Books and movies are very different entities. In the short parable Doubt, the readers are lured in to the possibility of a scandalous relationship between a pastor and an alter boy. The readers’ curiosity is ignited because they are not given all the details. Therefore, their mind wanders further than the plot to create a story and characters that acted on one’s imagination; thus, the story became entertaining- flooded by the questions of what? Who? How? By which the reader can only answer. At this point, the readers create their own movie in a way. They will determine important aspects: how the character speaks, looks like, and reacts. Whereas, in the movie, the reader has no choice but to follow the plot laid out in front of them. No longer can they picture the characters in their own way or come up with their different portrayals. The fate of the story, while still unpredictable, was highly influenced by the way the characters looked, spoke, and presented themselves on screen. The movie leaves little to viewers' imaginations.In order to be entertained by literature or art, the viewer needs to feel that they can use their imagination and not be confined to a plot that reveals all.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Frechtman Bernard. New York: Kensington Pub., 1976. Print.
In conclusion, it is hard to grasp the true meaning of the story unless the story is read a second time because of the author's style of writing.
Finally we can say that the discussion in the class and the differences in the interpretations showed us clearly the differences between the perceptions of the readers on the same work. In the lights of the reader-oriented theories one can claim that there is no single truth or meaning derived from the text, the responses will change as the readers change.