Before I start reading officially, I will briefly browse the whole book, which is one of my reading habits. Not much surprise, this novel provides several pictures, like many other books, that are simple and prevalent to the content. And there is a fun discovery I found while reading.
The story begins with a murder incident, and the author spends about two pages describing the incident, including how the murderer slaughter the family, the surroundings, the atmosphere at that time, and so on. He also inserts four pictures, three of them are pictures of the murderer, in these two pages in total; however, readers can’t see clearly about the murderer despite those four pictures. Whether his facial features, body, or posture, we can’t recognize the murderer from those pictures if we don’t read the descriptions.
What’s fun, when I read about what the murderer has done to the family, my first reaction is to look at those pictures carefully. My reaction reminds me of an article I have read before. The major point of the article is the relationship between language, word, and picture. For example, we are taught to recognize our parents since we were born. Rather than learning the term “mother and father” directly, we will first identify their faces and turn the pictures into memory and store them in our brain. Thus, when we look at their pictures, we can recognize them or even have more information according to our own background knowledge. We can understand that whether language and word or picture, they are all connected with each other. What’s more, the relation is not unidirectional, but conducts in a bidirectional way, which means that we can transform them in our brain easily.
On the other hand, humans are born as visual animals. It can’t be avoided that we will be affected by what we see. Thus, if the inserted pictures in the novel were quite clear and attractive. There are two effects that might happen. One is that readers might ignore the words and focus on those pictures. The other is that readers might be affected by pictures and their thoughts about them, and have problems connecting them with words. I have mentioned that connecting memory with words is the ability that we are born with. Nevertheless, if we have problems doing that, it might lead to cognitive bias.
Despite the fact that the pictures of the murderer are bleary, the author inserts a large number of descriptions about that murderer, including his outfit, behavior, and attitude. By doing so, we could avoid having cognitive bias. Moreover, we can still imagine what he looks like by ourselves easily according to those detailed descriptions.
I agreed with your point about the author's arrangement of the book. We often relied on our eye to know the world. It was a good thing that we could do it fast, but when it came to reading novels, it could somehow be a disadvantage to use lots of pictures since it might shorten our imagination.
ReplyDeleteHi my friend, after reading your reflection I found that the arrangement of the book is just like any episodes of Conan, the murderer will appeared to be all black before the big reveal, and it will arouse curiosity of the audience. The audience can guess who is the criminal by really engaging in the story and imagine what the possible suspects will look like when Conan is breaking down the incident.
ReplyDeleteJust like what you said, if the author already told us what the criminal looks like will definitely spoil the fun of reading books, because what I find fascinating about reading is that we can imagine the scenes ourselves and that's how I immersed myself into the plot. I really want to see what happened in the book and your reflection on them, because you always give very special perspectives when we are discussing anything, it will be very interesting if you share your reflection on the plot in the following logs! love u
I'm astonished by the author's capability to describe a scene and his attention to detail filled into two pages. I hope the illustration doesn't give out too much and rather collaborates with the author's writings. I'm curious about the upcoming plot of the story and can't wait for your next log.
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