Event Factory

Event Factory confused me from beginning to end. Although I had an understanding of the immediate action for the most part, getting a hold on the overall narrative proved difficult. I still don’t really understand the book. However, I was able to grasp some thematic elements out of the entire confusion. The biggest one was the smoke that I mentioned in class. I hadn’t thought of the reading originally of the smoke being pollution actually affecting the outsiders and not the natives of Ravicka. I actually read the narrator as losing her mind more and more throughout the journey, and the smoke as being something entirely in her head. The inability to determine whether the smoke was ever there or not, along with the contradictory narration giving me that impression, just said to me that the smoke was never there and that as she became more engulfed and confused she began to believe that this native silence was really a physical smoke taking over the land. The people she kept pairing up with and eventually splitting from all had different reasons for disappearing, but it could be that they all intentionally left because they noticed the instability in her or that they were never really there at all, since none of them, that I can recall, really left anything significant when they left, just parting after sharing some knowledge or information and not much physical. The beings with lights in their ears and the strange growths that the narrator saw through the narrative also gave me the impression of a person slowly losing their grasp on reality. Instead of these being used metaphorically to discuss the environment and culture, I read them as being the truth that the narrator saw and believed. Smoke covering the land that only she and the people she directly associated with noticing or being affected by, strange beings with lights in their ears that she saw and was told to have power over based on her fear and the fact that she could see them but they couldn’t see her, strange growths taking over the city that no one takes any mind to — all of this is only in her head, but she believes it to be true. Her insanity is taking over her perception of the land of Ravicka, and it isn’t until her last few days that everything seems normal again to her, when she’s finally realizing that there is nothing odd going on and that there is nothing to do but return home.