Dear Diary... or not?

When we started reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I thought that the narrator worked at the mental institution. Then I realized that I was reading the story from a crazy person’s person’s point of view. I found it a strange phenomenon, reading these disillusioned words. It pulled me from my ordinary world, and filled my mind with bizarre, unrealistic images. I started to think about how usually we have so much confidence that the narrator has real, educated, meaning behind every word and transition. In this case, I often found myself shaking my head in utter bewilderment.

As I thought of deranged writing styles, it actually made me think of my first diary. I recently looked over it with a friend and realized that I had absolutely no clue what a diary was. I wrote the first entry as a letter to my mother. After she told me that I was supposed to write to myself, I started to address the diary’s to “Liz ” and sign them “Elizabeth,” as if I was writing to my alter ego. Sometimes these entries would get slightly insane. I would sass “Liz” at times, in a joking way of course, or we would have mini arguments with each other. Reading back on them, it appears that I had some sort of multiple personality disorder. I was in first grade, so this is somewhat forgivable of course. Besides, although it may be difficult to believe, my same friend as mentioned above looked at her entries also, which were just as, if not more, twisted.

As children, we see things in a very different way. The narrator’s writing style seems almost childlike; he relates to things and explains things in different ways than we normally see. As a child, many things can seemed perfectly normal at the time, but years later I look back on my past self with amusement.