Unveiling the Unspoken Bond: the Intimate Relationship between Reader and Characters
At one point or the other, I’m sure most of us, readers, would have imagined ourself as one of the characters in the book we read or dreamed of the characters being with us in reality. I’m no exception from that. I’m an ardent dreamer, drawing pleasure from my dreams — often creating a world of my own with my favourite characters from all the books.
Isn’t it surprising how the journey, a character in a story goes through affects the mood of a reader?
The intense joy that bubbles deep within our heart when the protagonist achieves victory after an arduous struggle or the deep grief-stricken state you shrink into when you see tears streaming down their cheeks, it’s surprising how you feel every emotion they go through.
Little by little we get deeply sucked in the tale and we start behaving as if we were them.
It’s artful when even a prick of thorn is felt by us, the readers. We go into a state of frenzy when something awful happens to our favourite character. Be it the protagonist or the antagonist, we can never say for whom we will fall irrevocably in love with. It has happened many times, where I’ve fallen in love with the antagonist of the story. I have desperately prayed for them to win over the protagonist and either marry the heroine or have a happy ending, rather than the routine ones.
In each story, the writer sheds a pinch of himself, as thin as a film that you barely notice.
It’s only when you closely observe or when you are deeply immersed you begin to wonder if they might, as well, have gone through the same. Their words are a mere reflection of their deepest unspoken emotions. It gives you courage and determination to move ahead and pursue the dreams of your own, irrespective of the hurdles thrown along the way.
Life is not a bed of roses, nor is it a blanket of thorns. It takes a lifetime to find the perfect balance of it and not be dragged down by either of the weights. So is our reading journey. Though we know they are just fictional, we, being crazy readers, never wish to move ahead of a book that has given us so much to feel.
We readers, live a life or numerous when we read a single book. Call it the success of a writer or the passion of a reader. I’d say such a writer must have been a passionate reader to dribble off tales as mesmerizing as magic.
If you ask me, ‘Do you believe in magic?’, I’d definitely yell a big fat, ‘YES!!!, for magic lies in the inked words.
This blog post is part of the blog challenge ‘BookishCafeBloghop2024’ hosted by Rakhi Jayashankar and Samata Dey Bose.
