Introduction
Every human being possesses dormant sensibility realms that can be coaxed into wakefulness by books or works of literature. By basic definition, literature is an art and thus, it has the ability to refine and enlarge our understanding of various life concepts. Literature employs elements like intellect and imagination to arouse human sensibility and through this; areas of the human world are expanded and through these expanded areas, the individual man develops feelings of co extensiveness and solidarity.
Harold Bloom, a renowned Yale literary critic states that “Imaginative literature is otherness, and such alleviates loneliness”. This statement might seem ambiguous at first but when explored further, its true meaning becomes crystal clear. When one comes an imaginative literary piece, he or she becomes completely engulfed in the unfolding in the piece. One starts to look for a self story in the imaginative literature piece. This action is indeed one of the mechanisms by which you convince yourself that you are not alone. To put this assertion into practical terms, let us look at a sample imaginative literature piece: Ernest Hemingway’s, “Hill Like White Elephants”. The quoted publication is an excellent sample of a literature text that essentially returns the reader to otherness and alleviates feelings of loneliness.
Throughout the text, Hemmingway is able to arouse different feelings form the reader. For instance, Hemmingway does not inform the reader how the characters in his story came to their present situation. Neither does he tell the reader how the characters will resolve the conflict that they are in. He leaves these interpretations to the authors’ discretion. The reader does not need to be told these things. The answers to these questions are embedded in brief quotations and sayings in the text that the reader is supposed to interpret for himself. Hemmingway forces the reader to participate fully in the story, to support one side, to give answers to some of the unvoiced questions, to understand even better than the characters in his story do. From the first five lines of the story, a bright reader will already have deduced three things from the story: the anxious lady in the story is pregnant, the hugely insensitive man wants the lady to perform an abortion and finally, that it does not matter whether they proceeded with the abortion or not, the fact is that they will never be happy.
In fact, Hemmingway seldom tells the reader outright the feelings that he or she should develop about the characters, or what the story essentially means. In fact, if the reader brings zero life experience to the short fiction, there are high chances that one will read past the implications of the fiction piece without even realizing what they missed. By using his own self understanding to fit literal gaps, the reader essentially become part of the story, achieves a sense of otherness, and in doing so, he gains solidarity with one side of the characters and feelings of loneliness are removed. For example, when the author writes that the couple was arguing about “an awful simple operation”, a practical reader is able to realize that they are talking about an abortion. In doing so, that is supplying the missing link; the redder essentially admits or reveals something about themselves.
In conclusion, it emerges that Bloomers’ statement that “Imaginative literature is otherness, and such alleviates loneliness” holds through. Imaginary literature is a real therapeutic event. Literal texts such as “Hill Like White Elephants” present extreme satisfaction to our solitary selves by allowing us to be actively involved in the unfolding of the texts through “active cheerleading”
Works Cited
Hemingway, Ernest. "Hills Like White Elephants." Transition. (1927). Print.
