So I think I may have just found a paper topic from this story! Rather, many possible topics. I loved the astrophysics aspect to this narrative. And there was SO MUCH symbolism relating to black holes, I was totally geeking out. I don't want to give too much away before Wednesday, that way I have things to bring up, but after after class, I would appreciate some feedback on my possible topics.
The first thing I want to ask is why y'all may have thought the narrator used playing cards to refer to the days of the week. I thought it may have to do with the overabundance of uncertainty and unknown matters they were dealing with that it helped to relate those days of craziness to something more tangible and understandable, like a playing card. Or on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, the randomness of the events and odd circumstances related to the randomness of drawing a card from a shuffled deck...each day is a different card from the pile and you don't know what you're going to get.
What do y'all think was so significant about the cards?
I was honestly confused about the playing cards in the story. I didn't know if the specific cards had some kind of significance that I was missing. I thought maybe it was a way for the narrator to assign some sort of meaning to each day in order to go back through and think about it separately from the larger events. I also like your idea that it portrays randomness, especially since events were not told in order.
ReplyDeleteAt first I was super confused by the cards since my brain always tries to apply some sort of pattern to things. Once I accepted the randomness of it though, I assumed it was relating the randomness of the event occurring in their lives to the randomness of drawing a particular card from a deck. I was glad to see that someone else had that conclusion. However, some of the names of cards didin't seem that familiar to me, but then again I can never remember what the clover shape is called. But overall that's how I would interpret the playing cards.
ReplyDeleteI was also kind of thrown off by the playing cards in the beginning, but the way she kept coming back to it reminded me of taking probability theory, and how every example we studied involved a deck of playing cards. I interpreted it as having to do with predicting things; she assigned cards to these dates, but it still didn't help her to figure out what was coming next. Just like with drawing random cards- knowing what you drew before helps you a little bit in predicting what you'll draw next, but realistically you still can't make a very good guess.
ReplyDeleteIt might be from my lack of understanding of extraterrestrial physics, but I had a really hard time getting into this story. It just seemed like there was a lot of ambiguous symbolism and meaning thrown on top of a story that didn't really have much merit. I know that sounds really harsh, but just didn't take anything away from it.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't to do with the playing cards, but there's one thing I noticed that might be significant. When the narrator's partner finds her reading about astrophysics, the narrator compares it to being discovered reading Hustler. But that situation is more than simple embarrassment, because it involves a major revelation about the person. Her mother found out that she is a lesbian. Does she mean to imply that being found reading astrophysics would involve a similar major revelation about her character?
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm reading too much into that, but there you go.
As for the point of the story, I liked to think about it as being a window into humanity and how we often deal with things we don't know or understand. We often have the negative trait of sweeping things under the rug and pretending they don't exist or that certain things don't happen. If we can manage to ignore these things long enough, maybe they'll go away.
ReplyDeleteI also saw a good bit of symbolism that I wasn't able to connect with at first. But after re-reading it and thinking more about them, I managed to relate most of what I considered to be symbolic to some aspect of spacetime or blackholes/singularities.
The title is a good example of this. The Tidal Force is the force of the gravitational pull between a main body and its satellite that causes the main body the stretch in an oblong fashion. For instance the Moon does this to Earth which causes high and low tides. At first I thought, "Well, there was no mention of tides or even the moon for that matter," so I was left with looking deeper. I managed to decide that the tidal forces in this case may have been the pulling (tension) on the couple's relationship.
Also, tidal forces lead to tidal lock, which means that satellites revolve and rotate with the same period...synchronization...everything happens together. Just like the non-linear narration aspect of the story!
Sorry this was so long. Like I said, I really enjoyed this story!