SOTA LITERATURE TEXTS
TEXT GENRE WRITER
MEDEA DRAMA
MURAKAMI NOVEL BLIND WILLOW
SLEEPING WOMAN
Commentary:
The story reads like a daydream. A fairy
tale of sorts is built into the narrative.
What little action takes place occurs in
one of three settings: a bus, the hospital
cafeteria, and especially the narrator's
memory. The wonder of memory (and the
sensory stimuli that trigger it) is at the
heart of this story. Recollection can offer
comfort but can also create pain. The
distinction between recall and illusion is
sometimes blurry. Reminiscence has the
power to preserve the past as well as
connect us to the present. Time and
Nature both have mystical qualities in the
story. The human ear is depicted as
much more than merely a conduit of
sound.
Summary
The 25-year-old narrator returns to his
hometown after a five-year absence. He
accompanies his 14-year-old cousin to
the hospital. The cousin's right ear is
damaged, and his hearing is ruined.
Although previous treatments have been
unsuccessful, a new ear specialist is
going to perform a procedure on the
boy's ear.
The narrator recalls another trip he took
to a hospital eight years earlier. At that
time, he and a high school friend visited a
girl who was having an operation on her
rib. The girl had composed a poem based
on a dream she had. She told the story to
her two visitors and illustrated it by
drawing a picture on a napkin. Her tale
involved miniscule flies that crept into a
woman's ear causing her to fall asleep.
While she slept, the insects eventually
WHAT IS IT ABOUT?
Writer’s Style:
The play's merit consequently lies in its
manner of exposition and its emotional focus,
which Euripides places squarely in the flights
of amoral passion that afflict the protagonist,
Medea. Her infamous murders of her own
children challenged the Athenian moral
universe that continually hovers in the
background of the play.
What unifies the twenty-five short stories is
the encounter with the extraordinary, if not
outright supernatural, by characters who think
of themselves as exceedingly normal or
mundane.
>> characters are shaken out of their
apparently tranquil life when the unforeseen
occurs, be it an old lover calling, a tidal wave
snatching a life, or a talking monkey stealing
a name tag.
Themes: key themes of contemporary urban
alienation and the intrusion of the
extraordinary into ordinary lives as well as to
his overweening i.e. excessive humanity
Writer’s style: Murakami’s fondness for
multilayered narratives jumping across time
e.g. the young man remembers another
hospital visit in his own teenage years in Blind
Willow, Sleeping Woman,” >>The story is told
by a young man who has failed at his first
attempts to manage adult life. Now he is
accompanying his teenage cousin, whom a
sports injury has left sonically impaired, to a
hospital.
>> Sense of loss, untimely death, and all-
encompassing loneliness are never far from
Murakami’s characters.
 devoured her flesh. A man attempted to
awake (and save) her, but it was too late.
The narrator remembers that his high
school friend died not long afterwards.

The cousin's appointment with the ear

doctor ends with a sack of medication
and little likelihood that the day's
treatment will restore his hearing. The
narrator and his cousin eat in the hospital
cafeteria. The boy asks the narrator to
gaze inside his ears, and the narrator
marvels at the structure and mystery of
the human ear. He decides his cousin's
ear appears normal. Soon, the narrator's
mind once again drifts back to a summer
eight years ago and memories of his lost
friend.
a
ELIF SAFAK THE GAZE