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Hey everyone,
I hope you’re still enjoying the book. For the weekend, please post after reading through chapter 14. The nightly assignments are listed below, for future reference.
on Friday 1/8/10 – Read through ch. 14 & post
on Monday 1/11/09 – Read through ch. 17 & post
on Tuesday 1/12/09 – Read through ch. 20 & post
on Wednesday 1/13/09 – Read through ch. 24 & post
on Thursday 1/14/09 – Read through ch. 31 & post
on Tuesday 1/19/09 – Finish the book & post
Enjoy your weekend! Beware the Ludovician!
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ahhhh i’m very confused about the end of chapter 14. is eric talking to himself because it says “i’m you, of course. we’re the same dead not-person.” and they’re both wearing blue shirts. or is mr nobody referring to their similar conditions? and why is there brown water leaking from mr nobody? as well as his lack of eyes? also, if it was that easy for mr nobody to locate eric, do you think the ludovician could also track him down? or has it already and that’s why eric is so sick?
If mr nobody is indeed Eric — perhaps Eric is having some sort of hallucination which allows him to see himself from the past — is all of what mr nobody shares about his earlier life, Eric’s life too? Wouldn’t a “dead not-person” not be a real person, but more a figment of imagination?
Is Eric’s meeting with this man just another arrangement by his past self (like the letters) so that he can learn more about his past? Or maybe mr nobody says that they are the same “dead not-person” because they have both been attacked by the Ludovician…
yeah someone needs to explain what the bloody hell just went down in chapter 14 please.
reading the flashbacks of eric and clio makes me sad, because she’s so cool and i love them together. and i loved when they were talking about him being afraid of jaws and the open ocean..it was like post-foreshadowing or something.
and i don’t know if this is at all significant, but the fact that the corpsey guy in ch. 14 is called “nobody” reminds me of the odyssey, when odysseus tricked the cyclops into calling him “nobody”..and it would tie in to the greek myths that clio and eric bought in the flashback..but idk it’s probs not actually anything, i just thought it was kind of cool.
The only thing I could think of in the last scene is the fact that Mr. Nobody and Eric (or they are both the same person, who knows?) were leaking brown water. I feel like that they/he could be becoming the Eric/Clio that drowned. I imagined them turning into corpses of drowned bodies, terrifying I know. I know Eric didn’t actually drown like Clio, but he was involved in the same accident that she was.
And yes, the scenes with Clio and Eric are soooo sad. Also, what is Clio’s deal? Does she just have Cancer, or also some mental problems?
The thought sharks travel through social connections, and other shared data. Why do geniuses suffer from shark attacks, aren’t they creating new data (well as close as you can get) not looking at others work? Doesn’t that make them less likely to be attacked not more?
-”In the vast sea of data known as the universe, there exist many highly sentient data entities that possess no corporeal bodies.”
was the text in The Origins of Species that said “plant” the Luxophage? it’s scary to think that people can control the smaller conceptual sharks, because then that means that there are people in the world who can ruin other people’s lives through memory attacks as a form of revenge. Also, maybe someone is controlling the Ludovician following the second eric sanderson.
mr nobody said the way he is living his life now is best way someone being chronicaly attack by a Ludovician can live. is mr nobody really dead? and if so is what he is similar to how the second eric sanderson wanted to bring back clio? is it the same method of renewing life?
So I, like everyone else, am a bit confused about the whole Mr. Nobody being dead and dripping brown stuff thing. Also, like wmshakespeare said, he says that this is the best way he can live his life after having a Ludovician follow him. Does that mean that there is no way for Eric to get rid of the Ludovician?
Also, in the flashbacks, it seems like Eric already had some mental issues like when he has to take that walk cause he feels weird. And Clio had cancer? Maybe that’s how she dies..
Umm how about the phone call Eric receives in chapter 13? Was this truly Clio Aame’s voice coming from beyond the grave? Sure, Eric doesn’t have any memory of what Clio sounds like, but maybe he knows it’s her with something deeper than his mind or memory: “a word came up from my lungs and spoke itself out of my mouth, taking me completely by surprise: ‘Clio?’” (125). After all, did it not say in one of his letters that the first Eric Sanderson thought he could “change what happened to Clio” (77). He says he failed, releasing the Ludovician instead, but is there a chance that he actually succeeded, and the first Ludovician attack merely erased his memory of it?