Elements of Narrative and Design to show Meaningfulness
The main elements of narrative that stand out with respect to “Twelve Blue” are plot, theme, and setting. The plot is not really possible to follow because the story is an amalgamation of smaller stories. Some hyperlinks have a subsequent next hyperlink that is strongly related to the point where there is a micro-plot. For most of the story whichever hyperlink the reader will end up on next will have different characters and conflict. This confusion and feeling of being lost is by design because if it weren’t it would just be a huge mistake in an otherwise great work. The reader gets lost in the story with seemingly no plot and eventually has to click on this in order to even get anymore of the story.
While the plot is lacking, the theme is in the readers face from the begging. BLUE. That blue is with the reader from the very beginning and everything only gets bluer even the text is just another shade of blue by design and careful choice. In reducing the piece to a single word Greg Ulmer put it, “The needle point might be reduced to one word: blue... Joyce, judging the nature of digital art, leaves the narrative seeds largely in their concentrated state”. In the second half of Ulmer’s statement he states that the narrative seeds are in their concentrated states and with respect to the theme I can fully agree that that aura of sadness and gloomy feelings do surround “Twelve Blue” and this environment of sadness causes the reader to sympathize with the characters. Once Joyce forces the reader to sympathize with characters then the story becomes meaningful to the readers.
Another element is the setting which is not necessarily as concrete as the theme but as the reader there is some piece work to be done. A fair amount of the fragmented stories surround the river; one about the drowning, the young girlfriend of the boy who drown, and another about how the river snakes through most of the town. There are a couple more that are further disjunctive but still are connected to the river. Then, there are the fragments about the young girl at the lake which we can presume connects physically to the lake, a stretch possibly. Even further of a stretch was to presume that the fragments that take place inside of homes belong to the town that the river snakes through. The river becomes less and less present on the page and more and more present in their mind, by design, to embed the idea of the river in the readers mind without even having to write about it. Upon viewing the story in a way that allowed the river to be the setting or part of the setting there is only one outlying fragment of the story. The outlier is the fragment mentioned previously about the happy family of three. This is a clear indicator that with the setting of the river life becomes blue and without it there can be happiness. This subtlety and metaphoric statement about the river made this piece much more meaningful. It can be metaphoric for so many things, such as water is life and with life there is pain and sadness.
