ANALYSIS OF
"I HAVE SAID NOTHING"
In the link I have put in the firstpaper, you can access to an excerpt of
the hypertext "I Have Said Nothing" by Jane Douglas, the original is not
free available, but you can download it in www.eastgate.com.
That's
for why I have decided to analyze only the excerpt for you to know how is
the original more or less; and maybe you want to download it (if you can
economicaly).
The
excerpt has instructions
to read the both hypertexts, the original and the excerpt, and It is some
confusing.
The
hypertext is based on a real story of Jane Douglas's brother. I began reading
the option of "Do
you remember?", where we can read that Sherry, a "piece" of her brother
Luke, is dead but is remembered, after we can see a link of a continuation
of this part and say that he looked at Sherry when she were die, her
hand out of her body.
After reading that, I
made click to the option of "We
could say" where they make a conclusion that she es dead because a fail
of heart and brain's activity. And in "We
could also say", they tell us that she had died in piedes, not for less
oxygen, like doctors had said.
In
"If
that's so" whishes that she doesn't been listening what doctors are saying.
I after went to "In
the ambulance", when they are in the ambulance and know that she is dead.
There is a lot of noises out, but they can only hear the sound of her blood.
Next,
I made click on "_",
where are a black screen whith two links, one is "We
could say" again, to say again that they know she were dead, and the
other to "The End",
where just say: That's all she wrote.
You
can see that is a short part of the original, now I put some more information
of the original hypertext:
Bracketed by two fatal
car accidents, is a meditation on the enormity that divides us from others.
Douglas explores the
interaction between the fragmentation inevitable in hypertext and the causality
necessary for the creation of story; she says: " I have a vague..... conviction
that causality is the root of narratives: like E.M. Forster in Aspects of
the novel, I believed that you coul rip everything else to shreds as long
as you kept somethig tah resemled cause and effect pumping away beneath the
surface, you coul keep just about any amorphous blob going."
The
result is a thougt, hard-edged, look at how we fragment orselves to avoid
pain, to avoid the inevitable death.
CRITICISMS
"Superb, crystalling,
finelly balanced between savagery and sympathy"
Stuart Moulthrop
"I Have Said Nothing
uses the resources of storyspace in ways which demonstrate the coherence
and aesthetic satisfaction posible on a hypertext fiction"
Judith Kerman, the author
of Mothering