Essay Question: Ghost Ship Cliffhanger!
Thursday, November 24th, 2011 06:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rolanniWARNING: There may be spoilers for Ghost Ship in comments. This is a Warning, this is your only Warning. Proceed at your own risk.
Edited to Add:
Reminder to Anonymous Posters: 1. Please sign your post(s); 2. Anonymous posts don't appear until I manually OK them. That means that sometimes -- like today, for instance -- there will be a period of hours before you will be able to see your post. This is how the system is supposed to work, and you don't need to resubmit.
To everyone: Good discussion; keep it coming.
So! There's an expressed view that Ghost Ship ends on a cliffhanger, in the form of The Epilogue. We frequently get rapped for "cliffhangers," a charge I happen to think is (1) unfortunate and (2) inaccurate, but that's a rant for another day. What's interesting about the Ghost Ship "cliffhanger" is that the presence of the epilogue creates the "cliffhanger."
My question to you, then, is --
Would Ghost Ship have been a fuller and more satisfying read for you, had there been no epilogue? Explain, with diagrams, if necessary.
Mind you, Steve and I discussed this very thing at some length, and you see where we finally came down. I do think this is a topic worthy of in-depth examination, and I'm interested to hear opinions.
Have at it.
Edited to Add:
Reminder to Anonymous Posters: 1. Please sign your post(s); 2. Anonymous posts don't appear until I manually OK them. That means that sometimes -- like today, for instance -- there will be a period of hours before you will be able to see your post. This is how the system is supposed to work, and you don't need to resubmit.
To everyone: Good discussion; keep it coming.
So! There's an expressed view that Ghost Ship ends on a cliffhanger, in the form of The Epilogue. We frequently get rapped for "cliffhangers," a charge I happen to think is (1) unfortunate and (2) inaccurate, but that's a rant for another day. What's interesting about the Ghost Ship "cliffhanger" is that the presence of the epilogue creates the "cliffhanger."
My question to you, then, is --
Would Ghost Ship have been a fuller and more satisfying read for you, had there been no epilogue? Explain, with diagrams, if necessary.
Mind you, Steve and I discussed this very thing at some length, and you see where we finally came down. I do think this is a topic worthy of in-depth examination, and I'm interested to hear opinions.
Have at it.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-25 12:21 am (UTC)my book is not here, so i do not know what precisely is in the cliffhanger, but if it is the place where we find out that some people are not as dead as one might have been led to believe, then it is a million times better with the cliffhanger, because without it it would have been such a sad ending (although the tree gave a certain person two seed pods, so one kind of knows anyway, but ...). so, if that is the cliffhanger, then: definite thumbs up!!!