What did the two narratives have to do with each other? The daughter has been killed off on the fifth page.

But then it started to dawn on me what was happening. Dayrit: No, but having already seen the movie, I knew going into the short story that it didn’t matter, that even the verb tenses didn’t matter. Vlasits: I saw Arrival over the weekend just before reading the story, so I had the framework set up to accept the time jumps-maybe the movie gave me a little heptapod magic to be able to parse the story more easily?Īnd what do we make broadly of the structure?įallon: I read it twice, and once you know what’s happening, the perfection of the structure becomes so clear. THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE BY TED CHIANG MOVIE Did you notice that when she goes to ID her daughter’s body she says, 'Yes, that's her. She's mine,' and then at the very end, when she's describing being able to pick her daughter out of the sea of babies, she says the exact same thing?. Wait, excuse me, I have to go get a tissue. Or, like, how they’re talking about this alien language potentially being a primitive one where the reader needs to know the message’s context. but hey-o, we just had the Roxie/Nelson date scene where people understand what’s being said because of the context-the inside joke between the two girls.Īnd then, of course, as the meaning of the story becomes more and more clear, Chiang links the scenes more and more clearly. The heptapods 'use language to actualize,' then a few lines later, the linguist is reading the story of the three bears to her daughter just because the daughter wants to hear it (even though she knows it). The structure perfectly reflected the theme of simultaneous awareness, as much as a medium designed for our measly sequential mode of awareness can possibly be. Ugh, our glottographic written language is so earthbound! Vlasits: I think it’s telling, Sarah, that you read it twice in order to get to all of those details. THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE BY TED CHIANG MOVIE.

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