Hi everyone!
Our first live book discussion of The Intruder was fantastic and we covered a lot of territory, including that central twist, Casey’s character arc, the reliability of the narrators, and the ambiguities of the ending. I’m looking forward to seeing what folks want to dive into on Saturday. I’ll send around summaries of both discussions next week.
At the start of the discussion today I shared some data visualizations I created this morning after finishing my slow reread and the story spreadsheet. I’ll share those here now for anyone who wants to study them ahead of the discussion on Saturday or review them after our discussion today. I’ll include them in this post, but a few are very detailed and may be easier to see as PDFs on your own screen. You can download all of them from this Google folder.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to comment on this post.
Cheers,
Kristen
Intensity patterns
This first set of graphs track the internal and external intensity (or a combination) of each chapter in various ways.
Combined internal and external intensity
Internal (blue) vs external (red) intensity
Combined intensity for Casey (orange) and Ella (green)
Pattern of opening and closing story questions
A story question is anything the reader wants to have answered. For example, is that tree going to fall on the house? You’ll likely see this graph again because I think this will be the centerpiece of my eventual post on the structure of the novel as a whole. Compare it to the patterns in God of the Woods, which covers somewhat similar territory and themes but in a very different style.
Number of open questions in the bar graph at the top. How long each question remains open is indicated by the horizontal lines. The highest-stake questions are in red.
Endings versus POV shifts
I noticed that when Casey’s chapters end in a cliff-hanger, we often shift back to the Ella POV, which prolongs the suspense. This graph shows you where that happens, and also gives a good overall sense of the rhythm of those POV shifts. The Ella material is much more concentrated through the middle of the novel.
Casey POV in orange, Ella POV in green.
