Reading Response on Text and Subtext

I found Burroway’s section on choosing where to begin the story thought provoking. I think that I am guilty of always wanting to start at the beginning. Maybe I was trained to do so with all the fairy tales I read as a child which always started with “Once upon a time.” I also appreciated Burroway’s section on text and subtext. I think that I am guilty of being too literal, and this inhibits my writing. When I look at what I have written in the past, I realize that by concentrating on the surface of things, I missed opportunities to add depth to my writing. And maybe this is why I was surprised to find that I actually enjoyed the Hemingway excerpt. I think that in the past, I would have read the story for the text and missed the subtleties beneath the exchange between the girl and the man. For example, when the man tells Jig that the operation is a simple thing, her lack of a response reveals just as much as her words. On the surface it seems to be a simple conversation about some operation that the man is trying to persuade the girl to have. But, the subtext underneath the conversation (the unseen part of the iceberg) implies much more. Something has changed between the two and a simple operation won’t make things go back to the way things were. The girl smiles a lot in the story, but there is something wrong with her. There is also a loss of freedom of sorts that is alluded to in their conversation. This is a new dimension for me, that of the subtext and a little discomforting, because nothing is certain or empirical in this dimension. It is like interpreting dreams. They are never what they seem.