INTRODUCTION
In this part of the paper, I
am going to make a review of the hypertext “In the Changing Room which include
a brief description of the characters of the text; and then, I am going to
explain, under my point of view, the structure of this text.
REVIEW
The hypertext “In the changing
room” is the story of eight characters, all of them interrelated.
Each character tells us
strange stories about them that sometimes make you laugh.
You can choose which character
you want to start with.
Angelo. He is sculptor and is married
with Rita. In
his story, he tells us how he feels in the relationship with his wife and her
father, Gifford.
To avoiding them, he goes upstairs to the roof of the building and
when he is looking at the people in the street, where he sees another character
of the text, Hank,
he stares at some clouds in the sky and starts to imagine forms and
decide to take one cloud and sculpture it. When he does it, he thinks that is a
very talented man but his father-in-law does not realize about it because he
thinks that cloud sculpture is impossible.
Clara. She is in Porgetts,
a store in front of Angelo’s building. She is in the changing room
when she realizes that her reflexion in the mirror is
blurred and she thinks that the mirrors are defective, but there are other
women in the changing room and they have no problems with the mirrors. One of
the women is Elizabeth,
Rita’s
mother. After a while, Clara realizes that she has no reflexion
on the mirror and she comes back to the office where she works as a secretary
of Gifford.
Doris. She works in
Porgetts, and she is in charge of her father, Hank.
When she finishes her working day and comes back home, she realizes that her
father is on the ceiling because he lost his gravity. She thinks that is
because he needs to gain weight, and tries to feed him a lot. One day, when she
goes home, she discovers that her father is gone through the window, flying
with his chair.
Elizabeth. She is Gifford’s
wife and Rita’s
mother and is in Porgetts looking for a special dress
for her 25th anniversary with Gifford. She decides to buy a silver one. When
she arrives home she puts the dress on and waits for her husband. When he
arrives he does not remember their anniversary. Elizabeth is in the balcony and
shouts at him. He looks at her smiling and she runs to him. When she arrives
she discover that her husband is only a ripple. Her
husband is vanishing.
Gifford. He is Elizabeth’s husband and Rita’s
father, and is diminishing little by little. His wife says to him that it has
to stop, that he has to be normal, so he buys a mirror for his office and with
it he tries to control the vanishing process. But in the night of their
anniversary, he vanishes totally and he turns into another person: Kevin.
Hank. He is Doris’ father, and he has
discovered that his gravity is gone. He is always on the ceiling and has
realized that is more comfortable that the floor. When his daughter tries to
tie him for keeping him on the floor, he becomes angry because she does not
believe that he has lost his gravity, she thinks that is because he needs to
gain weight, so when Doris is gone, he escapes through the window,
and like this he is very happy.
Kevin. He is Doris’
husband, and the person which Gifford turns into in. One night he could not
sleep due to the moon’s light, and he decides to approach it. When his wife
realizes about what he is going to do, she tries to stop him, but he does not
feel good, he needs to do it. Finally, he does it, and is in this moment (in my
opinion), when Gifford
turns into Kevin.
Rita. She is Angelo’s
wife and Gifford
and Elizabeth’s
daughter. One night, when she is sleeping, she wakes up with the sensation that
her husband has misplaced her soul. She starts to look for it in the house,
followed by some cries coming from her soul (in her opinion). After trying to
find it with no result, she comes back to bed still listening
the cries of her soul. When she is asleep she dreams of some birds which she
relate with her soul and she sat on the bed waiting for the one who was her
soul to going to her, discovering that silence was the
secret.
STRUCTURE OF THE HYPERTEXT
When I saw the text for the
first time, I liked the way in which it was structured. When you open the text,
you can choose to read an “introduction”,
where the author explains you how to read the text, or go straight to “Begin Reading”,
where you find the main menu with all the characters and you can choose the one
you want to start with.
I decided to start with Angelo, but,
as I was reading a hypertext, it was not a straight reading. That is to say,
you begin reading Angelo, and when you click on “next”, you go to another
character which is connected to Angelo in some way, maybe through one word of
the text or maybe through the experiences in their life. This happens with all
the characters.
There is another way for
discovering the connections between characters. If you are reading the story of
them and you click on a linked word of the text, it takes you to a text of
another character and you can see how this last one is related to the word you
clicked.
The way I decided to read was
as follows:
At first I decided to read all
the texts about each character individually, for a better understanding of it,
and then I read it following the arrows and discovering the connection existing
among the characters.
The text is formed by 153 texts in total; 23 texts in Angelo,
26 in Clara,
14 in Doris,
21 in Elizabeth,
16 in Gifford,
15 in Hank,
21 in Kevin
and 17 in Rita.
The story has not a collective
ending. You read one character and you finish with his/her story, reading also
where the “next” button takes you.
This is the way I understood
this hypertext. Maybe your opinion is different to mine, but I think that
hypertexts work like this.
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Ana Murciano Beta
amurbe@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press