Many of Murakami's works have ambiguous details that could be symbols and ambiguous endings. Upon doing my own research about Raymond Chandler for my presentation I found that most of the criticism he received was regarding his own ambiguous endings to his short stories. Murakami himself has proclaimed Carver as one of his main inspirations and influences. In "The Second Bakery Attack" by Murakami he writes that Boku sees a volcano under water as he and his wife's stomachs rumble. In the chapters we read in Jay Rubin's Murakami and the Music of Words Rubin writes about a time that Murakami visited Harvard and a student asked what the volcano symbolized. When Murakami said it wasn't a symbol, an attending academic cried out in protest. Professor Elliott in class mentioned the scene in which Boku looks at the art in J's bar and describes it as similar to a Rorschach test, which is interesting as Murakami denies symbols in his writing. At first these attributes in Carver's and Murakami's writing aggravated me. But the more I read both of their works, and works similar where endings and symbols (or what appears to be symbols) are ambiguous, the more I came to love the ambiguity. Ambiguousness in literature is a wonderful example of art imitates life and life imitates art. Life is beautifully ambiguous and more often than not, events happen in which no meaning is clear but one must extrapolate the meaning. Nothing in life has clear cut meaning. We have to find meaning in the seemingly randomness of events in Carver and Murakami's stories as we do in our own lives. And I think that's beautiful.
No comments:
Post a Comment