I am forever astounded at the number of people who completely and utterly miss the point of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, which I both despised and love. They're some of the greatest novels ever written, and among the most effective at bringing out some kind of emotion in the reader (of course, some probably didn't LIKE that emotion, but that's the point).
Here's a handy guide to the points some people may have missed:
He desperately wants to live, and many of his fellow lepers *DID* commit suicide, some intentionally, some by stupidly acting as if they weren't lepers. He's suddenly plunged into an incredibly simplistic fantasy world. What reaction besides whining and moaning do you expect him to have?
| If he gives in and it's real, | he learns bad habits that will kill him when he gets back to our world (he loses). |
| If he gives in and it's a delusion, | he'll die much sooner (he loses big time). |
| If he doesn't give in and it's real, | he's doomed a world, but he lives (he loses a little). |
| If he doesn't give in and it's a delusion, | he might eventually recover his sanity and live (he wins). |
Thus, his only winning strategy is to not give in to the world, and hope that it's a delusion. The tragedy is, of course, that the readers know that the fantasy world is real, or real enough for our purposes.
Very similar to Thomas Covenant in reader reactions is an old Infocom game called Infidel. In Infidel, you are a sleazy archaeologist who abuses his native workers and is abandoned in the desert to die, just before you stumble onto the tomb you were looking for. You then do a normal Zork-like dungeon crawl, but the message behind it piles up harder and harder as you trash more and more treasures trying to get the big score... and finally the end text just slams the point home, in case you didn't get it before.
Most players *HATE* Infidel, feel nothing but rage at the author and at Infocom for releasing something so hurtful. So did I, for a long time, but now that I'm a bit older and wiser, I'm thinking that it was one of the BEST Infocom games.
The third case in the same vein is Watchmen, which demolished the shiny happy superhero. A *LOT* of comic book readers really really *HATE* the Watchmen, they think it's an insulting travesty. Worse, many think it's just a low-powered superhero comic, completely missing the point that Alan Moore was making. A lot of the more mature readers do get the point, and along the way lose some of their ability to enjoy shallow, immature "InvulnerableMan Saves The Day" comics (except for The Tick, but he's only nigh-invulnerable, and he's a fellow deconstructionist).
In all three cases, the material is inflammatory, has an anti-hero for the protagonist, and it's deconstructionist - they tear down some estabilished genre and show why it's *NOT* normal or rational behavior, merely a genre convention.
Naturally, most people initially hate change, especially internal change and realization that THEY experience. It takes a while to accept it and feel anything but rage, and some never do.
I do feel sorry for anyone who bought and read the Covenant books expecting a standard fantasy story, much like getting straight vodka when you expected water, but that doesn't mean vodka is bad, just because it's not water. It's not for everyone, and it's not for kids.
Gavrielle Perry's "Crossing the Gap" -
extensive analysis of Donaldson's Gap series
Last modified: 98Jul31
Ranted