Ghost written by Paul Auster is novel in the genre of mystery and detective. The characters names' are not revealed, and each character is positioned by a color. Blue is the protagonist of the book, and has the role to watch another character named Black by his leader white. Blue and black lives across from each other and Blue is assigned to watch Black very carefully, writing down his daily live actions. After a while, Blue gets bored of watching and writing about Black because his daily life actions consists of "sitting at a table.. writes, reads, eats, takes brief strolls through the neighborhood,seems not to notice that Blue is there" ( Auster 18). Blue has to give in a report to White and followed by every report is a pay check that Blue is satisfied with, therefore Blue continues to observe the boring life of Black. While observing Black, blue notices that he is also observing himself," To speculate, from the Latin speculatus,meaning to spy out, to observe, and linked to the word speculum, meaning mirror or looking glass. For in spying out at Black across the street,it is as though Blue were looking into a mirror, and instead of merely watching another,he finds that he is also watching himself" (20). In my opinion, I believe that the point Auster is trying to make is that when we are watching someone else, we are watching our ourselves: it is a mirror reflection of ones own self.
The meaning of the title of book Ghost,appears on page 66, identifying that Ghosts are both people in the past and writers. We all are surrounded by Ghosts and writing is the only way we can communicate with one another. Blue realizes that he is putting himself in Blacks live, and to run away from this problem, he decides to get out of it, and live his life the way he wants. we can conclude that this a metaphor of search because Blue wants to experience things for himself rather than being assigned a role. we can also conclude despite the fact that Blue is writing about black, Black is the controlling every situation
3 comments:
I agree with what you wrote. I like the fact that you brought up the theme of searching for identity on page 20 because I also wrote about that. This is because in the end Blue wanted to get out of the situation of watching someone and recording notes. By so doing, he wants to be the controller of his actions and not a character assigned to play a role.
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