As has been noticed in my analysis of the author's use of time and also in the presentation and importance of the woman: we are not as free to choose as what seems in the beginning. Many of our choices lead us to gaps in the text : work in progress or to dead ends where there is no more story. In order to find the end we have to make certain choices chosen by the author. I do not know if this is a bad thing or not. In the beginning it seems that the interesting thing about hypertext is the freedom that it offers the reader; that the story grows and evolves with us, the public. Even though it is possible to reach the end, by chance, the first time; we feel the need to find out more. After many clicks and twists and turns, it felt like I was actually beginning to find some kind of elusive logic in this strange phantasmagorical world, where characters appear from the past and the actual hero ends up becoming another character in this fiction born out of a dream. We are placed within the kingdom of death, autumn and the night remind us of it; and yet we seek and search for something, sometimes the luminous dome, sometimes the singing nightingales, the cool fresh running water, the enchanting smell of flowers or the lute of a woman whose mortality seems so strange to us. Nature is always more powerful than us, we are all mortal, and in the end we die. The only escape in this story, interestingly enough, is the escape back into the light and our mundane world when we wish to have an object which is not of nature; it is the desire to have something which someone else has, stopping us from letting go.

The Luminous Dome is a good example of fictional hypertext because just as we never find anything out about the luminous dome beyond the forest, the fictional hypertext can also take us on many journeys. Journeys where the story doesn't always end where it should, how we expected or even could understand, until we have gone round in a few circles. The non-linear discovery of the story and characters seems to immerse us even more than could be possible in most traditional works of fiction, and even though choice is reduced, as in this story, discovery is actually opened; we learn with the story, because the story is not one, it is many. Its many endings which go nowhere add to the understanding of the, so called, real ending.

[Introduction] [Time references] [Analysis of time] [Second Paper]

Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Ana Cuenca Montero
acuenmon@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press