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A Fall from Height


This is part of an experimental storytelling series. To avoid potential spoilers and because context is important, if you are new to this project, please begin with the Introduction located here. -SpaceBass

With today's episode, we take our first step into the more speculative portion of this project, where its intended audience comes into play. I had little expectation that the casual reader would make this particular leap.

Good storytelling encourages us to look past words and to explore the deeper meaning and symbology behind the construction of a fiction. Fiction can be mere entertainment but it can also be a shared lie that is told to convey a greater message, delivered by a necessarily abstracted reflection of reality.

Short stories are difficult to write, in that the constraint of length allows little room for inclusion of intricate secrets. However, it was my hope that one who read through this particular story twice would notice that virtually every word seems intentionally chosen for multiple purposes, and that the additional perspective lent from the first read significantly altered the perception of their meaning during the next. Of course, this needed to be subtle enough that one was not required to see it unless there were a desire to look – the story should still stand on its own.

There are several themes throughout the text; one is reflection. The "Service" and the "Machine" are two sides of a coin. The man and woman are another. Even in their world everyone dies but they make different choices in how to approach their destiny.

If we read through the story a third time, now focusing on her, we may see how certain of her actions could be interpreted in more than one fashion but for the most part her role appears relatively shallow compared to his.

This disparity in overt depth of his story versus hers may then cause the reader to question the purpose behind her fate. Why spend so much time building an alternate narrative for him but not for his complementary counterpart? Was it only laziness or did the author really intend to lead inquisitive ones to this barren cliff, yet leave no further options but to fall from it?

Please post your comments in the discussion thread linked from the trout icon below.

Download Text
233KB PDF, 13 pages, approximately 5,000 words

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Big thanks go out to my friends Krystyn, Andrea, Jon, Cary, and Dina, whose assistance was invaluable in constructing this series. Thanks also to the guys at the Machine of Death for the inspiration.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 2nd, 2011 at 1:35 pm and is filed under compendium, dci project, features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.