When
I first began reading Feed the experience was different from any other book I’ve
read because of the voice. When I say the voice, I mean the informality. As I
read it really felt as though I was inside the head of a teenager or at least a
regular angst ridden teenager. This is in comparison to teenagers like Holden
Caulfield and Charlie Kelmeckis. This was accomplished by the author’s frequent
use of the word like. We've all come in contact with someone who uses the word
like as a filler word and Titus’s did a variation of that. Feed didn’t necessarily
interest me immediately or any time after that really. It wasn’t hard to get
into the book except for the occasional unfamiliar slang word. I did enjoy the
experience of reading it, it was similar to a roller coaster. For example, when
you go to Disneyland and you’re on a ride, they do their best to try stimulate
a realistic experience. So if you’re supposed to be going into space there is
going to be lift off sounds and it’s going to get cold. The way the Anderson
did this was by integrating the feed into the book itself like on pg. 15, “…their
hit single “Bad Me, Bad You”:
“I like you so
bad
And you like me so bad
We are so bad.-“
---
“…Hostess M’s
American Family Restaurants. Where time seems to stop as you chew.”
I was able to get
a sense of what it would be like to have feed inside my head. At the point in
the book where the gang got hacked and Titus missed his feed, it made me think
back to now. The age of the smart phone. I hear kids all the time say “I feel
naked without my phone.” It always elicits furrowed eyebrows from me because
that is essentially saying that without the world easily accessible at your fingertips, you feel bare. Titus felt
bare without his feed, bare without the noise. The easy, effortless noise.
The lyrics of
rock pop goddess P! nk’s Sober ring
true here,” I don't wanna be the
girl that has to fill the silence. The
quiet scares me 'cause it screams the truth.”
With one change of the word girl to the word boy, these
lyrics fit Titus to a T. He doesn’t want the silence because then he wants to
fill it, but he can’t because he’s forgotten how to. That’s the truth he doesn’t
want to face. He doesn't want to be sobered up.
Briana
W. Prompt 1
Anderson,
M.T. Feed. Cambridge: Candlewick Press, 2002. Print.
I definitely agree with you that it feels like we're in Titus' head. Contrary to what you said, I think that the slang was pretty easy to pick up on once you get a hang of it and it gives you more of a sense of how their generation acts/speaks/etc. And there's no trying to make the novel sound like, scholarly or too professional because I think Anderson is trying to make a connection with the readers.
ReplyDeleteAlso, your relationship of the smartphone to the feed is perfect because it relates our two generations. Now I can definitely connect and see how Titus and his friends were feeling after they were hacked. It DOES feel like I'm naked without my phone. But the funny thing is that I was laughing at these kids in the book who had no idea what to do with themselves when their feed was shut off and were scrambling for things to do and now I see I'm just like them! Whenever I don’t have my phone I fidget with my hands and fingers and don’t even know what to focus on or honestly what to do when boredom strikes.
Nicole S.
I really like that you picked up on how the form of the novel communicates meaning here. I do think that Anderson wants readers to semi-experience what it's like to be hooked up to a Feed. He does this by incorporating Feed posts throughout the novel, as you've noted, but I also think that's why he's chosen Titus as a first person narrator, instead of using an omniscient, third person narrator. The reader actually takes a walk in the shoes of someone who has grown up with this technology and gets to experience it first hand. I also think this is why Anderson keeps his chapters so short, everything has to be constantly moving very quickly, much like the way that we're inundated with information today. But what did you think of Anderson's choice to not paginate the section where Titus is in the hospital recovering from the hack? What might this mean?
ReplyDelete