Yes, you must read through to the end. That is the way to the beauty.
A book offers us a text which … tells us something that cannot be modified. Suppose you are reading Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’: you desperately wish that Natasha will not accept the courtship of that miserable scoundrel Anatoly; you desperately wish that the marvellous person who is Prince Andrey will not die, and that he and Natasha will live together forever. If you had ‘War and Peace’ on a hypertextual and interactive CD-ROM, you could rewrite your own story according to your desires; you could invent innumerable ‘War and Peaces’, where Pierre Besuhov succeeds in killing Napoleon, or, according to your penchants, Napoleon definitely defeats General Kutusov. What freedom, what excitement! Every Bouvard or Pécuchet could become a Flaubert! Read the rest of this entry »