Typolifi: One of the question is: Are the things that happen to him determined by his own self or by fate's peculiar sense of humour? In the book, we may find both these interpretations, respectivelly by Fenchurch and himself.
Purple Frog: Now, what's so interesting about this?
Typolifi: Of course, you noticed that when you read about someone, you usually identify with him. Besides, it only really works when the caracter is imaginary, perhaps because at the very moment when you read, you are the only life this caracter has. The author and the readers are in a way the body of Arthur Dent, and his thoughts.
Purple Frog: Now what the hell is so interesting about this?
Typolifi: Well, you certainly saw that one of the things happening to Arthur Dent is the constant change of bags that occurs each time he moves in time and space. You must also have noticed the bit about the oliva oil bottle. The point is: If the reader incarnates something of Arthur Dent while he's reading, what incarnates Arthur Dent's bags, and especially the oliva oil one?
Purple Frog: I beg your pardon? What are you talking about?
Typolifi: Of course, you can say that the reader also embodies the bags, the bag changes, the spaceships, the Fords, the Trillians and even the Zaphods, and also Marvin. Nevertheless, you must have perceived that in fact, for instance concerning Fenchurch, you don't identify her to yourself but rather to the girl you're in love with, if you happen to be in love with a girl and/or if being in love with a girl is part of the usual set of things you can do, given your nature. Therefore,...
Purple Frog: Won't you shut up?
Typolifi: Err; no; not really. Therefore, the slight way the reader has to embody the caracters in the book also extends to the reader's symbolical environnement. Why symbolical? Because both the identification with the caracter and the life you give him are also symbolical, which doesn't mean they don't exist,...
Purple Frog: Oh yeah?
Typolifi: ... but only means they are very slightly light. Yet It's a fact they can influence your personnality and the way you act, and go on living within you. Indeed what through reading takes life in the symbolical world of ours is at least as much part of the external world as all the thoughts we have, it even has a better consistency because it has been pre-formed into a whole,...
Ok! Thank you very much, like you said, 'into a hole', ladies and gentlemen, we apologise for any inconvenience and wish you a pleasant way home, good bye, and sorry again, bye...
Typolifi: ...into an integrated entity, if you prefer, and therefore it has even more consistency than some of our thoughts.
Purple Frog: Than some of your thoughts, I suppose.
Typolifi: ... And thus, they can be connected to other bodies than our own, exactly the way we can think true things about other bodies than our own. In consequence, the symbolical embodiment of Arthur Dent's bag is one of our bags, not the one we use almost everyday, which symbolically associated to other things, but the bag we had quite forgotten about, the one we don't really use.
Purple Frog: To the point, please!
Typolifi: Then we should fulfill this symbolical role the bag acquired, by getting it used to unusual situations, like disappearing, being filled with strange objects, appearing, travelling through space and time, etc.
Purple Frog: Are you mad?
Typolifi: TAKE THE BAG AND DO IT! Fill it with unexpected things, try not to think, or if you do, think about the most unexpected things too, try to do something else that you planned, and you'll see...
Purple Frog: SEE WHAT?
Typolifi: You'll see whether it is Arthur Dent himself or fate's sense of humour that rules the succession of events happening to him.
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Purple Frog: But isn't it eviDENTly fate's sense of humour, because in a book the author is the fate?
Typolifi: The reader's expectation, too, am I wrong?
Purple Frog: Ok, as far as the author expects this expectation.
Typolifi: Therefore it is part of the bundle the author and the reader keep exchanging, this bundle being eviDENTly what I called before the Whole, that is the integrated entity constitued by the book
Purple Frog: No, not at all!
Typolifi: Yes, and this integrated entity is what takes live in your symbolical self when you read or when he wrote, it is an organism, centered on the very caracter of Arthur Dent, whom the reader therefore mainly embodies. Thus it is the caracter itself that decides, and indeed it's internal logic has been split from the author in the act of creation he performed, a little like when you give birth.
Purple Frog: I don't give birth, I only exist on a network
Typolifi: Ok, ok, when ONE gives birth. And therefore both the author and the reader are not a concern any more when the new-born Arthur Dent lives his own life, that is when the writer has created and the reader makes something he has decided to be unexpected, thus sacrifising for a short while his own internal logic to let Arthur Dent out, alone with himself and fate. That's what the bag thing's about.
Purple Frog: Did I mishear or did you say: 'What am I talking about'?
A welcome message by U42
I don't know how to say it because it sounds silly and because I didn't know him, but his death makes me want to cry.
  
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