5 ms·

On the one hand, yeah, that's a bit much to insist on that being the whole thing. On the other hand, good (or even just competent) authors usually put things i

On the one hand, yeah, that's a bit much to insist on that being the whole thing. On the other hand, good (or even just competent) authors usually put things in the book for a reason, usually for a narrative, character development, or thematic/message reason. Everything in a book was put there on purpose. In most books that aren't terrible, there's some reason the author chose one thing over another. The pig may be there because the author felt a need to explain how the kids could eat and survive, so that's one purpose—but there were other ways to do that. It's entirely reasonable to wonder why a pig and why is the scene exactly that way when both things could have been totally different. It's difficult to write well, yourself, without really embracing the idea that a book is crafted and the parts are there on purpose and for a reason. Some choices may genuinely end up being arbitrary, even in a very good book, but lots of them will not be.

roofone 5y ago
Totally agreed and well said. It can be easy to read too much into something (especially when people are learning how to understand literature in high school), but some level of decision-making, i.e., design, goes into every word. Nathaniel Hawthorne didn't choose scarlet because it was his favorite color.
- magicalist 5y ago
  Lord of the Flies is also a particularly silly example because the author practically hits the reader over their head with the officer at the end to yell at them, "this is an allegory!"
watwut 5y ago
Honestly, I don't think this is true. Good writing is not the same as "making high school analysis easy by making everything for straightforward reasons". Plenty of times, things are there, because it experiment or atmosphere or even needing to make it longer.
- brimble 5y ago
  > Good writing is not the same as "making high school analysis easy by making everything for straightforward reasons". Where'd I write anything like that? > Plenty of times, things are there, because it experiment or atmosphere or even needing to make it longer. Even then, the author's picking one thing to put in over a bunch of others they could have chosen. Novels are artificial, what goes in them is what the author decides is best to be there. Often, there's a reason for their choice. Stopping at "the characters were hungry" is leaving a lot of potential meaning on the table. OK—but why, of all the ways that could have been addressed, did the author write that they killed a pig? Why wasn't it sufficient for that to be "off-screen"? Why was that more important to include than other things that could have filled those same pages? This is especially a valid path to pursue when there are other cues that a book may be operating on more than a strictly literal level, and there definitely are such indications in that one. The final line does all it can without grabbing the reader by the lapels and slapping them, to communicate that the book's more than just a simple story about some kids stuck on an island. At a minimum, it's got some allegory going on, because it all but says as much at the end. [EDIT] The killing of a pig features heavily in a book that tells you at the end it's got at least some allegory going on, and a major character is nicknamed "Piggy", I might add. Like... yes, I think it's very fair to say that's included and plays out the way it does for reasons other than "the kids were hungry".
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    There are all kinds of choices when making art of any sort. The internet more or less proves that there are many things that never even appeared to the creator(s) as choices at all, but to those interpreting/experiencing the art appear to have been choices made for a reason. Why did she wear a red sweater? Why was it set at the equator? Why did it rain? Why is the only named plant a phylodendron? Why did they leave for 2 days and not 3? Why did journey go north instead of east? People convinced that all art is created by careful choice-making at every possible juncture seem to find it a little difficult to accept that the creator(s) of a piece of art that they like may not even have experienced a particular story/view/sound/structure point as a choice at all.
ars 5y ago
> Everything in a book was put there on purpose. > there's some reason the author chose one thing over another. Like the significance of the number 42? Sometimes you just put in pig because it was the first thing the author thought of. Not everything has hidden meaning. Over-analyzing something happens quite a bit. Sometimes it's just there, for no particular reason.
- brimble 5y ago
  There's a major character named "Piggy". Lord of the Flies, however overanalyzed (or, more often, just poorly analyzed) it may be in high school classes, is not a great place to start making the case that going past the barest of surface meanings isn't advisable. > Like the significance of the number 42? Maybe 42 was arbitrary. Maybe Adams just like the sound of it (still a reason!) Making the answer a number with no particular obvious meaning was surely not arbitrary or accidental (would it read the same if he'd picked 3.1459...? Or 7?)
- pessimizer 5y ago
  You can't come up with a random number without using a machine or an algorithm, and neither could Douglas Adams.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  42 was chosen for a reason, because it appeared random. It wasn't that Adams didn't care; something was being conveyed.
- mlyle 5y ago
  > Like the significance of the number 42? Adams was stuck on what the answer should be. He eventually decided it should be "should be something that made no sense whatsoever – a number, and a mundane one at that" He was writing radio plays, too. I am sure he was thinking of how it sounded, too. Could another number hold up there? Sure. Could any number hold up? Thirteen or seven or two hundred sixteen wouldn't have been a cultural touchstone, and this isn't entirely by accident.
vidarh 5y ago
> Everything in a book was put there on purpose. This is nonsense. Having published two novels, I'll say with confidence that a lot of things makes it into books just because it happened to come to mind while you were writing. Some authors will pay attention to every phrase or every word. Many do not. This is true even for famous authors - I vividly remember an interview with one who was painted a dramatic picture of symbolism in one of his novels by an interviewer, and then asked about it, and answered that he wished he'd thought of that - he'd just liked how the sentence sounded. A whole lot of people's interpretations are fine as people's personal head canon, but all to often people project intentions on an author they never had.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I agree, having written some short stories and novellas. Sometimes it really is just dinner and the conversation is what it is. There doesn't necessarily have to be structurally purposeful meaning or metaphor in every paragraph. Not every work of fiction is Ulysses.
- brimble 5y ago
  Several posters seem to have read weird things into the phrase "on purpose". I don't mean that every single word in a book has some grand meaning, but that the author choses to affix some words to the blank page and not others, and then leave them in (or change them) through various editing passes. A novel isn't like a tree in nature where you can just say "it looks that way simply because it does, and that's it—sheer happenstance and natural processes". For example: In real life someone goes to the kitchen and makes a sandwich because they're hungry. Sure, good enough. In a book, an author including a scene in which a character makes a sandwich probably included it for reasons beyond "the character was hungry", even if the reasons are purely structural or for the author's convenience ("I needed them in the kitchen to smell the gas leak") rather than to advance a theme or mood or anything like that. Characters don't have needs, and the degree to which their satisfying normal human needs must be included in a story to maintain suspension of disbelief is typically minimal—so why spend three pages on sandwich making? There should be a reason. If that scene includes two paragraphs on the character's choice of mustard, there should be a reason (even if it's just "I thought it was funny"). That's what I mean. It's worth interrogating the purpose of the inclusion or exclusion of elements in a book, and the details, because the construction of a book in a certain way is deliberate. That doesn't mean every book stands up to close reading. Sometimes books don't have much going on beyond the surface level (but there are still, guaranteed, reasons behind much of what makes it in, even if they're mundane structural ones—lack of reasons, or bad ones, can amount to mistakes if the included purposeless elements don't, by happenstance, improve the book) but sometimes they really do. In The Lord of the Flies, there's no island. There are no kids. Golding made them up. Golding didn't put pigs on the island and choose to have the kids notice and then kill a couple them because that was his only option. Even if it had been, he didn't need to devote as much page-space to it as he did. He also wrote in a kid whose nickname is "Piggy", and who features prominently in the book. And there's a whole thing with a pig head on a stick in it. So yes, I think it's totally reasonable to ask "why pigs?" or "what did killing the pig mean?" or all kinds of things along those lines, without any risk whatsoever of disappearing into poorly-supported fancy.

roofone 5y ago

Totally agreed and well said. It can be easy to read too much into something (especially when people are learning how to understand literature in high school), but some level of decision-making, i.e., design, goes into every word. Nathaniel Hawthorne didn't choose scarlet because it was his favorite color.

magicalist 5y ago
Lord of the Flies is also a particularly silly example because the author practically hits the reader over their head with the officer at the end to yell at them, "this is an allegory!"

watwut 5y ago

Honestly, I don't think this is true. Good writing is not the same as "making high school analysis easy by making everything for straightforward reasons". Plenty of times, things are there, because it experiment or atmosphere or even needing to make it longer.

brimble 5y ago
> Good writing is not the same as "making high school analysis easy by making everything for straightforward reasons". Where'd I write anything like that? > Plenty of times, things are there, because it experiment or atmosphere or even needing to make it longer. Even then, the author's picking one thing to put in over a bunch of others they could have chosen. Novels are artificial, what goes in them is what the author decides is best to be there. Often, there's a reason for their choice. Stopping at "the characters were hungry" is leaving a lot of potential meaning on the table. OK—but why, of all the ways that could have been addressed, did the author write that they killed a pig? Why wasn't it sufficient for that to be "off-screen"? Why was that more important to include than other things that could have filled those same pages? This is especially a valid path to pursue when there are other cues that a book may be operating on more than a strictly literal level, and there definitely are such indications in that one. The final line does all it can without grabbing the reader by the lapels and slapping them, to communicate that the book's more than just a simple story about some kids stuck on an island. At a minimum, it's got some allegory going on, because it all but says as much at the end. [EDIT] The killing of a pig features heavily in a book that tells you at the end it's got at least some allegory going on, and a major character is nicknamed "Piggy", I might add. Like... yes, I think it's very fair to say that's included and plays out the way it does for reasons other than "the kids were hungry".
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  There are all kinds of choices when making art of any sort. The internet more or less proves that there are many things that never even appeared to the creator(s) as choices at all, but to those interpreting/experiencing the art appear to have been choices made for a reason. Why did she wear a red sweater? Why was it set at the equator? Why did it rain? Why is the only named plant a phylodendron? Why did they leave for 2 days and not 3? Why did journey go north instead of east? People convinced that all art is created by careful choice-making at every possible juncture seem to find it a little difficult to accept that the creator(s) of a piece of art that they like may not even have experienced a particular story/view/sound/structure point as a choice at all.

ars 5y ago

> Everything in a book was put there on purpose. > there's some reason the author chose one thing over another. Like the significance of the number 42? Sometimes you just put in pig because it was the first thing the author thought of. Not everything has hidden meaning. Over-analyzing something happens quite a bit. Sometimes it's just there, for no particular reason.

brimble 5y ago
There's a major character named "Piggy". Lord of the Flies, however overanalyzed (or, more often, just poorly analyzed) it may be in high school classes, is not a great place to start making the case that going past the barest of surface meanings isn't advisable. > Like the significance of the number 42? Maybe 42 was arbitrary. Maybe Adams just like the sound of it (still a reason!) Making the answer a number with no particular obvious meaning was surely not arbitrary or accidental (would it read the same if he'd picked 3.1459...? Or 7?)
pessimizer 5y ago
You can't come up with a random number without using a machine or an algorithm, and neither could Douglas Adams.
wolverine876 5y ago
42 was chosen for a reason, because it appeared random. It wasn't that Adams didn't care; something was being conveyed.
mlyle 5y ago
> Like the significance of the number 42? Adams was stuck on what the answer should be. He eventually decided it should be "should be something that made no sense whatsoever – a number, and a mundane one at that" He was writing radio plays, too. I am sure he was thinking of how it sounded, too. Could another number hold up there? Sure. Could any number hold up? Thirteen or seven or two hundred sixteen wouldn't have been a cultural touchstone, and this isn't entirely by accident.

vidarh 5y ago

> Everything in a book was put there on purpose. This is nonsense. Having published two novels, I'll say with confidence that a lot of things makes it into books just because it happened to come to mind while you were writing. Some authors will pay attention to every phrase or every word. Many do not. This is true even for famous authors - I vividly remember an interview with one who was painted a dramatic picture of symbolism in one of his novels by an interviewer, and then asked about it, and answered that he wished he'd thought of that - he'd just liked how the sentence sounded. A whole lot of people's interpretations are fine as people's personal head canon, but all to often people project intentions on an author they never had.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
I agree, having written some short stories and novellas. Sometimes it really is just dinner and the conversation is what it is. There doesn't necessarily have to be structurally purposeful meaning or metaphor in every paragraph. Not every work of fiction is Ulysses.
brimble 5y ago
Several posters seem to have read weird things into the phrase "on purpose". I don't mean that every single word in a book has some grand meaning, but that the author choses to affix some words to the blank page and not others, and then leave them in (or change them) through various editing passes. A novel isn't like a tree in nature where you can just say "it looks that way simply because it does, and that's it—sheer happenstance and natural processes". For example: In real life someone goes to the kitchen and makes a sandwich because they're hungry. Sure, good enough. In a book, an author including a scene in which a character makes a sandwich probably included it for reasons beyond "the character was hungry", even if the reasons are purely structural or for the author's convenience ("I needed them in the kitchen to smell the gas leak") rather than to advance a theme or mood or anything like that. Characters don't have needs, and the degree to which their satisfying normal human needs must be included in a story to maintain suspension of disbelief is typically minimal—so why spend three pages on sandwich making? There should be a reason. If that scene includes two paragraphs on the character's choice of mustard, there should be a reason (even if it's just "I thought it was funny"). That's what I mean. It's worth interrogating the purpose of the inclusion or exclusion of elements in a book, and the details, because the construction of a book in a certain way is deliberate. That doesn't mean every book stands up to close reading. Sometimes books don't have much going on beyond the surface level (but there are still, guaranteed, reasons behind much of what makes it in, even if they're mundane structural ones—lack of reasons, or bad ones, can amount to mistakes if the included purposeless elements don't, by happenstance, improve the book) but sometimes they really do. In The Lord of the Flies, there's no island. There are no kids. Golding made them up. Golding didn't put pigs on the island and choose to have the kids notice and then kill a couple them because that was his only option. Even if it had been, he didn't need to devote as much page-space to it as he did. He also wrote in a kid whose nickname is "Piggy", and who features prominently in the book. And there's a whole thing with a pig head on a stick in it. So yes, I think it's totally reasonable to ask "why pigs?" or "what did killing the pig mean?" or all kinds of things along those lines, without any risk whatsoever of disappearing into poorly-supported fancy.