The final scene, with Mulder playing piano duet with the mysteriously altered child, is moving and satisfying but also a little confusing. Are readers to assume that some kind of woodland group consciousness also played with his brain cells? Or am I being over-literal?
No, but Mulder's life was altered by his sister's abduction much in the same way that Sarah's has been through her mysterious interaction with the woodland being. He felt set apart by the event, just as she does by her experiences and her special knowledge. And I think it is safe to say that Mulder was a highly gifted child, who would have grown up feeling somewhat different from his peers even if he had had a "normal" childhood. But would he have become an FBI agent, let alone found and begun investigating the X-Files?
She should have understood. She knew his mind - the keenness of it, the depth. But she only knew what he could show her. All those years ago, after the choice had been taken from him, he had invented himself. He had narrowed the focus of this thoughts - for his family's sake, for Samantha's. How old had he been? Twelve? Thirteen?
But before that, he had been eleven. He had stood where Sarah stood now, and Nathan. His mind had whirled with new thoughts, new ideas. He had watched his ideas falter as they collided against the minds of others. He had let himself become separate. And somewhere, sometime, he had sat like this, blind on a piano stool, and felt music falling from his fingers.
She should have understood. He had tried to tell her.
"Samantha didn't play the piano. She couldn't do trigonometry."
No, not Samantha. Samantha was only a backdrop to the things Mulder saw in Sarah, the things she let him remember.
So maybe he is remembering what it was like to be an ordinary highly gifted eleven-year-old boy, on the cusp of adolescence, before everything in his life is changed. I think you might be onto to something about the consciousness-transforming forest entity thing being symbolic; the story works for me on both levels.
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winterfish
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Date: 2010-02-11 10:02 am (UTC)No, but Mulder's life was altered by his sister's abduction much in the same way that Sarah's has been through her mysterious interaction with the woodland being. He felt set apart by the event, just as she does by her experiences and her special knowledge. And I think it is safe to say that Mulder was a highly gifted child, who would have grown up feeling somewhat different from his peers even if he had had a "normal" childhood. But would he have become an FBI agent, let alone found and begun investigating the X-Files?
She should have understood. She knew his mind - the keenness of it, the depth. But she only knew what he could show her. All those years ago, after the choice had been taken from him, he had invented himself. He had narrowed the focus of this thoughts - for his family's sake, for Samantha's. How old had he been? Twelve? Thirteen?
But before that, he had been eleven. He had stood where Sarah stood now, and Nathan. His mind had whirled with new thoughts, new ideas. He had watched his ideas falter as they collided against the minds of others. He had let himself become separate. And somewhere, sometime, he had sat like this, blind on a piano stool, and felt music falling from his fingers.
She should have understood. He had tried to tell her.
"Samantha didn't play the piano. She couldn't do trigonometry."
No, not Samantha. Samantha was only a backdrop to the things Mulder saw in Sarah, the things she let him remember.
So maybe he is remembering what it was like to be an ordinary highly gifted eleven-year-old boy, on the cusp of adolescence, before everything in his life is changed. I think you might be onto to something about the consciousness-transforming forest entity thing being symbolic; the story works for me on both levels.