p. 272-273: LOST
However, I would contend that the blast door map’s least successful function concerned spatial orientation, as the map provides little sense of scale or relationship between the outlined stations and the places we had seen on the island. Instead, the map functions more like a roster of places, names, and clues scrawled onto a wall, a to-do list for fans anticipating what might be revealed in future episodes. It also provides a window into a number of character subjectivities, visualizing the mental states of the map’s two authors-to-be-named-later, Radinsky and Inman, who chronicle their limited mythological knowledge and island explorations under duress, as well as orienting us to Locke’s obsessive quest to make sense of the briefly seen images. The map also charts narrative time and events, as we try to situate the drawing’s creation into the island’s backstory and our own limited knowledge of the history of the DHARMA Initiative. Thus as fans worked to decode the multiple versions of the map, they arguably were less engaged with questions of spatial orientation than attempting to understanding the embedded representations of a fictional storyworld, refracted by still-to-be-discovered characters and events.