Trumbo

My favorite part of the book so far has been chapter VI. I really like the way Dalton Trumbo constructed the chapter. The way he flows through sentences, ignoring convential punctuation, and the way he uses short sentences, like “But we’re not. I must have been asleep. I must have been dreaming. It’s so hard to tell” (page 82), entices me. I find myself reading to a rhythm, like a song follows a beat. It seems in this capacity that the timing of a story is more evident. Time merges together much better when commas don’t separate past actions from the present. It’s a different kind of clarity, instead of telling you when things happened, it allows you to decide when time happened – which is a more direct reflection of our mental understanding of life. I find that this is a very intuitive style of writing. It eliminates counter-intuitive elements such as errors in comprehension that overtake the brain’s processes in more important aspects of reading – such as understanding what is going on. I feel as if I could read the chapter over and over again, and it would be no more boring than telling a good story over and over again. It makes sense in spite of the transition from paper to voice – something that is not as easy when punctuation dictates how you say everything.