25th February: Two Tragedies

I think I'm supposed to find some parallelism between this story about the leaping frog and the hanged man at the bridge. While the former seems to be utterly funny and pointless, and the latter a deeply emotional and mournful one, I'm not to be distracted easily.

The point I'd like to make first is that – while I may be completely wrong regarding this story – sometimes a piece of literature may have a desired effect other than entertaining, even if there's no definite message. Due to this nature of the effect, it would be hard to express its essence; perhaps an adjustment in the way we see the lives of different people. In both stories I think, we've got protagonists who made the right decisions in the beginning, but then, they forgot to pay proper attention and made bad mistakes. One can find real tragedy in the leaping frog’s story by ignoring the comfortable set of a supposedly fictitious story in a supposedly fictitious story and the fact that Mr. Smiley hasn’t got any particular features to deeply sympathise with. It is funny though that the reader enjoys a writing that (s)he more or less agrees to be pointless and basically boring.

A completely different, yet interesting issue of the second story is that whether the imagined escape is unreasonably long considering the few seconds of fall in which it was experienced or not. Probably the best answer is that the writer didn’t care, and nor should he. Many of us have already experienced dreams that seemed scores of minutes long, while they occurred in just a few minutes’ sleep, and that phenomenon may be strengthened further by extremes of danger. It’s also somewhat surprising that the dénouement surprises most of the readers, although several clues are given. The most important perhaps is the ticking of the watch that seems to slow down infinitely, and the environment being a bit surrealistic during the escape. Half of the readers may take those as regular exaggerations, and half may concentrate too much on the success of the protagonist; as for me, I’ve fallen to both.