The Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang II

“don’t ask me to explain it” p. 130 and 172

This line is the first line when I thought that this whole story is a simultaneous thought process. Actually, not just a simultaneous thought process, but like a semagram with each of the anecdotes acting as small characters. This effectively shows the narrators ability to think simultaneously. Until this point, I thought that the story of the daughter had direct correlation to the story of the heptapods that directly precedes or follows the story of the daughter. However the two stories, the story of Nelson and her daughter, and the story of Colonel Weber are both similar stories where the players knowingly or not, participate in this play that becomes the “private joke” of the knower. The stories are so far away from each other that they seem unrelated, but they are definitely connected to each other. I think similarly, each story is connected to something else, placed in random formation like Heptapod B; like the whole story is one huge semagram- each story being “characters”, the connecting stories as “sentences”, and this whole story like a “paragraph.”

The quote also represents the narrators view on her new found knowledge, the future. She cannot explain it to anyone what happens because it is like her private joke. It is like how the readers of the “Book of Ages” cannot tell other people that they have read it, because then it becomes a paradox, or the private joke would no longer be there. Her simultaneous existence also reminds me of Orr. I’m worried that the narrator would confuse herself with the memory of past, future, and present existing all at once just like how Orr had all the memories of different realities in his head. I guess it is a story that she would have to keep a secret not only because it violates the rule of thumb[you cannot reveal the Book of Ages!!] but because she can be perceived as mentally ill or used with malicious intent.