He’s Blind for a Reason, You Know

-66- The author has created a minor constellation of difficulties for himself by introducing a blind character into the work, so something important must be at stake when blindness pops up in a story.

-67- The challenging thing about literature is finding answers, but equally important is recognizing what questions need to be asked, and if we pay attention, the text usually tells us. … A truly great story or play…makes demands on us as readers; in a sense it teaches us how to read it.

-68- If you want your audience to know something important about your character introduce it early, before you need it.

It’s Never Just Heart Disease…

-69- The writer can use heart ailments as a kind of shorthand for the character…

..And Rarely Just Illness

-70- When a writer employs TB directly or indirectly, he’s making a statement about the victim of the disease.

-71- When works get reenvisioned we learn something about the age that produced the original as well as about our own.

Don’t Read With Your Eyes

-72- …a too rigid insistence on the fictive world corresponding on all points to the world we knew can be terribly limiting not only to our enjoyment but to our understanding of literary works.

-73- If we want to get the most out of our reading, we have to try to take the works as they were intended to be taken.

-74- Don’t read with YOUR eyes. Don’t read only from your own fixed position.

-75- If you want to put pressure on a character to cause him to change or crumble, take him away from home.

Is He Serious? And Other Ironies

-76- Irony trumps everything