In this book, “the Coma” by Alex Garland, it talks about a coma patient exploring his dream in order to try to find a way to wake up. In his dream, he experienced confusion because things were different from how he remembered it and he seems to forget many stuff. He then realizes that he is in a coma and then tried to find ways to wake himself up. He constantly tried many ways in waking himself up but without the things he should have remembered but forgotten, he doesn’t really know his identity or occupation. The things he can remember are blurred so he knows part of the truth but not the whole truth.
Because the book is explaining the psychology of a patient in a coma, it gets confusing at times. The weakness of this book is the short chapters. The chapters are so short that it is sometimes a page or half a page long. Although this book is very interesting because it keeps the readers anxious to know what really happens when one is in a coma. One of the flaws of this book is the chapters. It is pointless to me to see that this book have so many chapters when each chapter is really the continuation of the last. Reading it, I felt as though the author just made one section into another chapter to expand the pages. This story do captivates its readers but these chapters really annoy me and make me lose focus every single time. It completely made me neglect the reading and focused on the length of the chapters and compared one chapter’s length with another.
The other flaw of this story is switching the event and the scene. Although the content of the story is understandable, the way how the author writes makes it confusing because the reader would then have to remind themselves that the character is switching from being awake in the coma to being awake in real life but no actually awake at the same time. The author did try to italicized chapters where the main character, Carl, is awake but not awake at the same time. The italicized chapters did help with the transitioning but the narration switches. The way Carl explains the situation gets mixed up. For example, in chapter two of the second section, one paragraph states, “The next morning, I was lying on the bed. I was lying on the bed, and the nurse was walking across the room towards me,” (Garland 74). It was confusing the first time I read this line so I had to reread it again. In this book, there is one Carl, but there is also two of him: the coma version of him and the sleeping version of him. It transitions between both on
Due to the complexity of careful syntax and dictions required to make this book less confusing, the author also divided this book into three sections. The first section talks about Carl in his coma sate where he continues his “daily” life. He thought that he was either paranoid or had a stroke which affected his brain. He was unaware that he was in a coma but he did notice a few strange things which he can’t explain so he thought that he was hallucinating. The second section reveals to the reader that Carl suspicion continues to grow until he realize that he is wake, but only in his dream. He realizes that he is never awake and that he is in the hospital, still in a coma. The third section reveals how Carl tried to wake himself up by trying to take a road down memory lane and remember something that might make him wake up. In the end, he saw himself in his dream the incident which led him to his coma state.
Each section allows the book to be less confusing because the story continuously switched the scene where Carl is in his coma to where he is awake in real life but can not move. To have the whole plot revolve about Carl in his coma sate is confusing because if the diction is poorly worded, the story itself would be confusing. The author tried to divide this book into three sections to make this story less confusing.
I think that his style of writing did make this less confusing to read. This book gets harder to read if the book wasn’t divided into this way and if the chapters were long. The author was careful in making the chapters really short to make sure that the readers can grasp what they read and the illustrations also helped.
To conclude, this book’s weakness, which is the writing style, is also its strength. It does get annoying at times but it makes the book a whole lot easier to read. Because the book focus on something very complex such as talking about the things a coma patience experience, confusion is very common.
