Analysis

The focus of my analysis is the space. In “The colour of Television” I have found different examples about this concept. When I talk about “space aspect” I want to refer to several places where the action comes to life and develops. In this hypertext I have found a lot of verbs that indicate the change from a place to another or from a space to another one.

I have several examples of it: shifts to; turns; makes for; across; walk back; climbs, running through, roams back and forth and flying.

Reading the piece and focusing on the spaces I have noticed that the reader can be transferred from Moulthrop’s House to a shop where Saul works, a main character of another story which is told in the same hypertext, that can find himself in a spaceship and then in a hot-air balloon.

The most important space, in my view, is the Melmoth’s House made up of three-bedroom two-bath Colonial in a nice seventies development convenient to schools, churches, and the mall. While they are watching television, Harry and Lorrain, that are the main characters, hear a noise coming from upstairs. This last word is fundamental because the text goes on describing their house, namely it is a home with more floors. Another space is the shop where Saul works,

The television is a means of communication between reality and fiction, but while the reality remains always the same for the viewer, in the fiction the space can change according to the viewer’s will.

By Channel-surfing we can find ourselves in different spaces and places in a very short time and this fact reflects the structure of the hypertext that I’m analysing: as a matter of fact the hypertext is made up of many different parts, each one with its colour.

Moreover, while reading it I noticed some words such as downstairs, upstairs and stairs that describe a shift form a level to another one. In order to make this point clear I will give some examples:

Saul plodded downstairs in flatfooted clump clumps;

A noise come from upstairs now, a muffled, bumping scraping sound of something heavy being dragged along the carpet. They hear a familiar floorboard creak upstairs.

He makes for the stairs but Lorraine stops him halfway;

He gestures to the stairs in the back.

He ever so carefully heads down to the store, opens it up officially, and sits in front of his terminal.

Going on with my analysis I observed that there are some words such as: windows, doors and remote control TV switch that are like a bridges through which we can go from a space to another one, this because a window divides an indoor place from an outdoor one, as it happens in the hypertext ; we can say the same for the door, but it can also divide two internal spaces. Through the remote control TV switch instead we can move our attention from the real dimension to a fictitious one.

Touched by a sudden draft, Lorraine turns to find an open window;

She is still looking out the window, where something has drawn her eye;

Harry runs for the door, Lorraine closely following;

Front and back doors appear to be shut tight she can't see any open window;

In my opinion there are two kinds of spaces: concrete aspect and abstract one:

Meet the Melmoths, Harry and Lorraine: a mortgage broker and systems analyst from Marietta, Georgia. Homeowners, nonsmokers, Presbyterians, aged 43 and 38, married six years and seven months next Thursday. One child 9 was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. Colonial in a nice seventies development convenient to schools, churches, and the mall.	The screen swarms silently. "Channel 64 is dead," she says.
Sure enough, the shelf on the big bookcase where they used to keep their 30-inch Zenith now holds only a dark and dust-free oblong, footprint of the missing object.	All around the world they are ascending, each and every one making its way into the sky.
the entrance to his shop opened onto a popular square, filled with popular people.	They drifted for an hour or so, trying out various parts of the sky, until the time arrived for Boris to check the instrument

Index Firstpaper Secondpaper Introduction Conclusion

Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Giuseppe Improta
imgiu@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press