My Experience With Riding Horses

1660 Words4 Pages

With two narrators experiencing different facets of island life, the reader is able to encounter a fully realized fictional world that feels physically present to them. Not only does the reader encounter a swath of characters via the two narrators’ interactions, there is a great deal of motor resonance that occurs based on the transitive movement descriptions surrounding both Puck and Sean’s experience of riding the capaill uisce, the water horses, who come out of the sea to visit the island of Thisby during October and into November when the Scorpio Races actually occur. Passages that involve their riding include sensory details of the feel of the horse moving beneath Puck or tactile descriptions of how the horse’s mane feels between Sean’s fingers as he weaves braids into the water horse’s hair in order to calm him down. The reader is able to truly latch on to the story because of these details, and even a reader who has little experience with riding horses has enough detail to imagine himself or herself in an embodied way. Stiefvater’s world building techniques are of vital importance to allowing the reader to truly experience the island as if it were a real place they could encounter in a physically present way in real life. While it seems as though a simple detail or gesture can be of miniscule importance within a narrative, although that may be true in terms of plot, such details are minimal cues that prompt a reader to imagine a larger reality surrounding this one event. Puck mentions “Grattion’s is a riot of sound, with people spilling out onto the walk. I have to push my way through the door…Inside, the place is abuzz with noise and a crooked line leads around the wall. The ceiling feels low and crowded with its exposed ... ... middle of paper ... ...hook, it 's just not going to mean anything to anybody else” (Maggie Stiefvater Website). It is the combination of the world building narrative techniques and the shifting narration, which launch the reader into the world of Thisby where the reader becomes immersed in the tension leading up to the races and the need to encounter more of the lore that surround the vicious, beautiful water horses. However, in the end, it is the emotional truth, the capacity of the reader who has theory of mind, that he or she can empathize and understand the reader. It is Puck and Sean’s engaging personalities and tangled motivations that enable the narrative to hook its claws into the reader, whereupon the first person point of view, swath of sensory details, and emphasis on transitive movement encourages the reader into creating an embodied simulation of Sean and Puck’s experiences.

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