Amanda Bissonette - Notley Response

The first thing I thought of when I started to read this book was a nightmare. It seemed like one of those dreams where no matter what you did or where you went, you would never get out or feel safe. Everything was so out of the ordinary and scary which led me to the idea of a nightmare. Also the confusion felt by Alette and myself, not knowing what was going to be in the next subway car or station, led me to think that this was a nightmare as well. We discussed in class, the possibility that Notley purposely made the reader confused, and I agree with this because I feel like in order to get the most out of the story, you have to be on the same level as Alette. It wouldn’t be fair for the reader to know everything and the main character still is in the dark. It gave me something to think about as I was reading. Who was the tyrant? Why did Alette end up in that subway car? Without that confusion, you wouldn’t be able to read that much into the story. You would know everything and just be watching this one character figure things out.

After having our discussions in class, the duality of male vs. female made a lot more sense. There are several points in the reading where women are shown to be on a lower level than men. We assume the tyrant is a man, and Alette, a woman, must defeat him. This gives a powerful voice to women and this is where the feminism we mentioned a lot in class comes out. The tyrant over rules everyone is this world and the women of the world seem to be brought down more than the men. “I am a painter I have been trying to find a form the tyrant doesn’t own something he doesn’t know about hasn’t invented, hasn’t mastered hasn’t made his own in his mind not rectangular not a sculpture not a thing at all he owns all things…my very own body did he invent me” (Notley, 25). This woman is afraid that the tyrant owns her because he owns all form, including human form. She is saying that she will never be able to be her own person, fully, because the tyrant will always own a part of her, her body.

Another interesting thing that we discussed was the use of quotation marks. We still don’t know there exact purpose, but I think it was to show dialogue between multiple characters, although sometimes it was hard to tell who was talking. A lot of the time, a poem is just one character thinking or talking, but Notley is showing that her work can still be considered a poem even though there are many characters. There was also almost no punctuation. I don’t completely understand why there is no punctuation but it makes me think about the nightmare concept again because in a dream there are no stops, it is just a constant stream of activity.