Haughty Lady

Although the author of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel is arguing points I agree with for the most part, there are a few instances where she comes off extremely arrogant and haughty. She gets a lot of pleasure out of stating things that, I believe, majority of people know in the back of their head. For example, she takes a few pages to state how when the reader feels a particular kinship with a novel, she feels as if she is communicating with the author. This sort of connection between the reader and writer is and has been evident to me for a very long time. When you like a book, you become so engulfed in it, that it makes sense that you would believe the author is writing this book for you. “This is the essential pleasure of literature, ideas going into and out of words over and over and over, any time the reader opens a book, or the author takes up a pen” (84). The author argues that the writer, the book, and the reader have a sort of circular relationship. The author’s idea turns into a book which then turns back into ideas for the reader.
The second point I agree with is the idea of willing suspension of disbelief. The reader has to have some sort imagination and can’t question everything that he reads. The author uses the novel The Metamorphosis as an example. She talks about how some students in her class were unwilling to believe that the main character could just turn into the bug just like that. I agree with what she says because when you have the question of why did this happen? In the back of your head, it would be hard to enjoy the book to the fullest. For example, in Zamyatin’s We, the One State is far-fetched even though it is in the future but I still believed that something like that could exist and therefore, enjoyed the novel more. That was about all that I could agree with in this chapter.
The author argues that a good novel has to have an author that is common. She says it enables a reader to relax with a novel and it gives relevance to their own life. This isn’t true at all. The whole genre of dystopian novels totally disproves this theory. How do George Orwell and Yevgeny Zamyatin know what it will be like to live in the future? Although true they are basing the future on current issues, the authors do not have any commonness to the situation but it still seems to give an in depth look into what life is. All good novels have theme whether or not the author has experienced firsthand one he or she is talking about. In Zamyatin’s On Language he talks about how it is important to speak and think like the main character does. This is just as effective as if the author experienced the things he is talking about personally. She also states that books by Donald Trump, Albert Einstein etc. would not be interesting. I do not understand how the popularity or amount of fame one has can affect the strength of a novel. There is no direct correlation between commonness of a person to how good their novel is.
Overall, the tone of this chapter made me upset. The author made analogies and connections to things that were not necessary at all. For example, she took about five pages comparing a novel to a game. All of these analogies had the same basic idea: the author and the reader have to establish a connection; something I learned when I was in middle school.