Possesive Pronouns

When I began trying to discover something to base my visualization on, I began using Hayles Only Revolutions search engine. I initially started searching through words I would assume had meaning or patterns to them. I found a few but none that hadn’t been done before in blog posts or that helped me interpret the novel, so I began to look elsewhere. Using voyant I tried to determine significant words I had not thought of in my reading or during class. That search yielded nothing as well. Finally I decided I wanted to investigate the significance of the cars in the novel, as travel is a fairly central motif throughout. I looked on Hayles commentary where a comprehensive list of the cars was available. Once I had that I began looking for a pattern in the cars themselves, possibly a car related to their current location, maybe the value of the car? None of these hypotheses panned out. I then noticed a pattern in the pronouns regarding the car in each narrative. As time for each narrative went on, Sam and Hailey began referencing the car in a less and less selfish way. They begin with claiming MY car, progressing to THE car, then the majority of pronoun references are found when they start saying OUR car. At the very end they selflessly claim that the car belongs to the other. I found this to be a very important pattern as it further solidifies the circular nature of the novel as well as the romantic relationship between Sam and Hailey.

For my visualization I wanted to make it a circle to represent the cyclical nature of the novel. As one narrative ends the other begins sort of thing. The length of the color sections were originally going to represent placing in the novel according to page number, and line thickness was going to represent how many times each pronoun was used in reference to the car, but I was unable to logistically do this, so I settled on length of line representing the number of pronoun usage and citing page numbers very loosely, using them only for reference to show that there is an order in which they appear in the novel. I used 0, 180, and 360 because they reinforce the use of a circle. As you can see the most predominant (longest section) pronoun used for both narratives was OUR, which I think further symbolizes the romantic aspect of the novel as being together. With my text in the visualization I colored the “o”s to resemble the text of the novel, for no other reason than to make it a bit more themed. I used gold and green to coincide with the colors in each narrative respectively. I think this makes it more efficient, as the observer has most likely read the novel and is familiar with the color scheme.

What I wanted to do with my visualization is make it ambiguous, but not too ambiguous. To me the use of more selfless pronouns mean a deeper connection and giving of self between the two characters, but I didn’t want to put anything in my visualization that would allude to that, I wanted it to be entirely up to the observer what he or she made of it and how it shaped their interpretation of the novel. I also wanted to guide the observer into thinking that Sam and Hailey are tied together in their pronoun use, and that each narrative switches sides from selfish to selfless from beginning to end.