4/2/2023 0 Comments The one that got away spacieMost of the time, animals are just observing the scene, turned towards it either from the forefront or from the background. 7, a vulture is perched up on a branch in mid air: both the bird and the branch are represented as silhouettes, totally blackened. Some of them evoke danger, such as the obvious fear of the rabbit looking in at the right angle on the bottom of page 4, expressing the sense of dread and impotence the captured “one” must feel. They appear only in the illustrations, and contribute to divert the reader from the story, as they are often playful, but function as witnesses of this strange search. Horses, of course, the cowboys’ dog, and the inhabitants of the landscapes: birds, mice, lizards, insects, snakes, rabbits, coyotes, bats, and snails. They all have ropes and one of them has a guitar.Ħ There are also the animals. His appearance is a cross between a hippie and an intellectual. Two of them have black beards, the third looks rather feminine, has long straight hair and wears glasses. The group of hunters are the cowboys, who are not named. The other ones or the herd of ones are qualified as “one and another one”, or “many ones”. In the story, two creatures play an important role: the first one to be caught, (“a strong one”, “a good one”), who is captured and photographed, and “the biggest one”, who escapes the corral, and is the “one that got away”. The hunted are multiple “ones”, that is to say creatures recognizable as the same species who have a chunky geometrical form evoking the numeral one. The charactersĥ The characters are divided into three groups: the hunted and the hunters, and the observers. The children reading this album are confronted with a riddle that can only be solved by an adult, explaining the different meanings and uses of the word “one”.Ĥ The laid-back presentation of the text and Dirk Zimmer’s illustrations, referring to popular ballads of the wild West, aim at seducing the reader and deny the possibility of a simple and straightforward narrative, putting logical language under constant erasure. By homonymy, “one” can be a person, an object, or a numeral it works as a grammatical substitute as well as a point of departure for all types of narratives. By playing with perception and nonsense in clever switches of words and digits, 1 Percival Everett asserts that our perception of the world is totally subtended to its semantic representation.ģ Everett explores the figuration of words, mischievously choosing “one” as a signifier that can designate anything and contain an extraordinary possibility of meanings. But both text and images contribute to make the counting process impossible and disorganize the reader’s sense of space. His curiosity (.)Ģ In the tradition of wordplay and nursery rhymes, this album revolves around the ambiguity of the simplest word: “one”. 1 The One That Got Away is not an isolated example of the author’s multiple interests.
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