My Growth as a Reader

Before I had begun AP Literature, I had expressed little interest in poetry and short stories. This was partially because I was not an avid reader for a good three years, as described in My Reading Story. More importantly, I found little interest in these two genres due to the fact that with my cursory reading of written material, it seemed impossible for short stories and poems to convey different stories or themes, thus limiting my degree of interpretation of the work. In contrast, I reveled in long novels for precisely the opposite reasons; well written novels often were multi-faceted, and, even with a cursory understanding of the novel’s plot any symbolisms, I was able to find several themes which I could delve into endlessly. Little did I know then that all I was doing was to drink water from a pond with my hands, which suffice to say, meant I was taking small portions at a time.

The first novel that I had to read for AP Literature, Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, taught me the importance of Point of View within the novels and how it influenced the narrative, and subsequently how I came to feel about the characters, the background and the events that surrounded them. More importantly, I had come to learn that the author was capable of using that Point of View to both convey an immersive atmosphere and to trick his audience into not only seeing the world narrated in the novel, but also themselves without even knowing it. Of course, this revelation did not come easily. To be able to readily recognize such aspects of literature, I had to focus upon the work strenuously, just as I had to do so with the Arnolfini’s portrait. On both accounts, I was rewarded handsomely, as on the middle of the portrait, as this allowed me to see the characters’ true intentions and even a glimpse of the author. Of course, at this stage of my growth, I wasn’t able to realize the deeper implications of the multiple points of view.

It was during the Poetry unit that I was finally able to delve into the significance of literary elements, and in turn further strengthened my understanding of Point of View. The two poems which I had to analyze for Poetry Analysis (To Be a Woman and Who’d Want to Be a Man?) were written with similar intentions in mind, describing the anguish men and women feel due to societal pressures and expectations. Yet the two poems differed in mood, conclusion and composition. At first, I struggled to understand that it was by these elements that poems were understood, and as a result constantly misinterpreted even the most basic aspects of poems, such as plot, purpose, and even themes. As I began to grasp that the difference in rhetoric with the two works were due to the nature of men and women’s sufferings, I had come upon the revelation that literature, not only poetry, held a fundamental part of overall message within its symbolisms, and I had ignored this aspect until then. When I discovered the momentum literary elements had on literary works, I felt that I had discovered a completely new world, a world which was rife with subtle, rich nuances. With this in mind, I analyzed the novels I had to read for the Independent Reading Project, adding notes on how the birds of Pala in Huxley’s Island symbolized the simple ideologies of the habitants of the nation, and how Bernard’s pathetic portrayal was a portrayal of the common, petty man.

With a potent new tool of analyzation at my disposal, I went through the final part of my growth during this semester; I fused these components in order to immerse myself into the base emotions and sentiments of the works I read. While reading Frankenstein, I at first shifted my point of view from the modern reader of the 21st century to the Victorian reader in order to understand the sheer impact Shelley’s bold decisions regarding  the portrayal of a man playing god, the usage of Paradise Lost, and the humane yet artificial construct would have brought. In order to gain a deeper understanding and bond to the work, I experimented with shifting my point of view back as a modern audience, considering how the prospects of science, ethics and religion had changed since the day Shelley had penned the first word of the novel. My success in empathizing and connecting to the work may be questionable, but I feel that my attempts to do so has vastly enriched my understanding of literature as a whole, and that my growth as a reader had vastly contributed to the increasing quality of my essays as well.