Ambiguity is, if anything, a springboard to understanding and/or appreciating a text. Foster points out in his book that we can never really know what an author meant, was thinking, or was intending by writing a piece or part of a piece unless we directly ask them ourselves, and with many “literature” authors, that’s impossible unless you’re a necromancer. Since we’ll never be able to ask JD Salinger what Holden’s red hunting cap was a metaphor for or why Emily Brontë wrote about so many ghosts in Wuthering Heights, we have to do the next best thing: make the answers up ourselves. This level of ambiguity turns some readers off, mostly those who can’t be bothered to read between the lines and figure things out for themselves. Those who aren’t turned off, however, have a field day with it. Because no one really knows the answers to these questions, a person can answer them in just about any way they want, and most of the time, it makes the book way more interesting.
Consider, for example, rereading The Great Gatsby and imagining that Nick is gay and in love with Gatsby. Doesn’t that make for a much more exciting read, when Nick sneaking out with McKee is shown in a new light? Or, perhaps, reading it with Gatsby’s skin color in mind. Reading the man as black adds another depth to the book. Now, it’s not only about the struggles between classes and the two sides of Egg, but also about the racial differences of the time.
These new outcomes are just as exciting, if not more exciting, than the black-and-white outcomes plainly written on the page. When a person can make the story anything they want it to be, it’s not only a more exciting read, but a more enjoyable one overall. The ambiguity allows people to imprint themselves onto the characters, or to mold them how they want, and that allowance adds a new level of connectivity to the piece. Isn’t connection what literature is all about to begin with, whether it’s connecting dots between works or between people?
Alycia,
ReplyDeleteWhen I first read about ambiguity, I felt slightly cheated because I felt that it meant there was no originality. However, reading your blog reminds me that there still is. In fact, I agree with most of your blog, especially the last paragraph where you make a point of saying that connections can be between the reader and the work, not just between other works. Whenever I read, I try to imagine characters differently from how the author interprets them, to try to connect them to myself. I’ve found that in some cases, it allows more connections to be made to more works but adds a sense of uniqueness to the story. You’re right when you say it makes the story far more enjoyable.
Alycia, I absolutely love the way you described ambiguity as a springboard. That is a perfect explanation of it. It's a stepping stone of sorts. A pathway to more intrigue and depth. We do not realize that ambiguity surrounds us, not only in the things that we read, but in the real world around us. We stigmatize ambiguity perhaps because we like to cling to resolution and the unknown scares us, but we face ambiguity every day. As you said, ambiguity allows someone to make a story as grand as they wish, simply by differing their interpretation. There is no right or wrong answer, that's the beauty of it. Ambiguity leads to broad interpretation, which is something not at all to be feared. The book examples you used were perfect demonstrations of the beauty and complexity that ambiguity provides.
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