| Chapter 1: | What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage |
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- 4. The reader may wonder at the connection between Little Red-Cap’s disobedience in order to do something beautiful for her grandmother (picking flowers) and her grandmother’s grim death. Doesn’t this terrible death in consequence of Little Red-Cap’s attempt to offer something beautiful require explanation?
- 5. The reader may be curious as to why the wolf decides to entrap Little Red-Cap by running ahead of her to her grandmother’s cottage? Why does he not lay hold of her when he meets her in the wood and devour her at that point?
- 6. The reader may wonder what the significance is of the red cap poking through the wound. Why did the wolf not die from being cut open? Why the need to kill him by filling him with stones?
- 7. The reader may enquire about the link between the darkness of the woods Little Red-Cap strays into and the darkness inside the wolf’s belly.
Additional general questions which a reader reading in this manner might ask include the following:
- 1. Why am I primed to notice breaks in the story rather than emphasising continuities?
- 2. What is my attitude to these breaks?
- 3. What is my feeling about them?
- 4. Why do I find the explanations I do for them?
- 5. What is it about (a) the story or (b) me which leads me to take the story in the way I have?
An Associational Reading of “Little Red-Cap”: Recapitulation of Characteristics of an Associational Reading
The text read in this manner will strike the reader as comprising incidents, descriptions, dialogue, and events which join in a coherent and unbroken stream. One item seems naturally to lead on to another or blend into another and items, once given, seem to complete each other. All is disclosed in the succession of linked items.