Rhetorical Blog 1

Dax M.

Amanda Irvin

English 10803

Blogging Rhetorically

Reading this essay surprised me in the best of ways. Jeramey Kraatz's ability to write a college level essay with such a juvenile tone is genius. This essay would be a wonderful children's story and would serve well in a book of short stories for the young teens. However, the juvenile writing is part of the genius. There is a method to this madness. I believe that Jeremy Kraatz was connecting with the vocabulary that he used at the time in his life that he created Blake Stone. Voice is what makes this narrative unique. Voice is a hard thing to find in a writer and some go a lifetime without finding it in their writing.

Kraatz's description and attention to detail is absolutely remarkable. His description of CalendarGAL often makes it to where I can feel the woman's sculpted hip under the thin silk dress. His detail doesn't create the picture, but instead guides the imagination into place. This would very much be like the way he had to come up with the pictures. Given only slight detail in the chat profiles, his imagination was left to itself, but with the guidance of the words written in the profiles. By doing this, he recreates his experience and passes it on to the reader.

Due to the same re-creation described earlier, Kraatz transfigures this potentially boring narrative into an adventurous fable. His description of the chat room and quote of the conversations there-in would be absolutely boring if they were just flat out read. Instead, he creates a story with the manuscript of these chats. Just his simple banter with CalendarGAL and her flirtatious tendencies are enough to cause the reader to want to read faster. His narration in between dialogues creates the perfect sense of scene and placing. The fact that he switches between first person and a form of third person omniscient causes an immersion of the reader that is terminal.

The immersion of the reader is caused by Kraatz's weaving of fantasy and reality. This world created by his, ultimately the reader's, imagination is so intriguing that it is possible for the reader to wish that the story doesn't end the way it does. Some readers could wish to stay emerged in the swirling fantasies of this teenage boy. Elaboration preserves the magic caused by this revelation. The real world can be completely wiped away with a few clicks of the keyboard, and that makes everything so much more appealing.

Why is this moment so important to Jeramey Kraatz? Why is it that this simple chat room experience had such an impact on him that, almost a decade later, he chooses to write about it? To an overweight pubescent boy, and I speak from experience, going a day without ridicule is hard. I believe that this is one of the first waking moments for the young Kraatz. He can finally escape into a world where he is the man he wants to be and he equal to everyone. Yet later on, when his dreams are crushed by seeing the reality of CalendarGAL, he banishes the chat room from his life. All of this to find out that there are people just as unattractive as he was on the other side of the screen. What could possibly be the moral in such a story? The loss of virtual friends, the playing on the heart strings of a young boy, the realization of a boy's mistake in sinking too far into the fantasy world; What gave him the inspiration to share a story? Perhaps the tragedy of the event has stuck with him for this long and caused long term problems in his life. Through this narrative, I feel as if I got to know Blake Stone more than I did Jeramey Kraatz. Possibly he writes narratives of his fantasies instead of himself for the same reason he started the fantasies in the first place. Or could it be that he learned that it is better to live life in your conscious self than to live it in a fantasy? God only knows how many hours, days even, he spent stuck in his own thoughts and fantasies. Many life experience opportunities might have passed him by. That is the moral that I pulled out of this story. It is better to live life, no matter how bad it is, instead of living in a fantasy because, at the end of the day, all fantasies must come to an end. What is left is the world that the fantasizer let pass by; Incomprehensible to them, they are left socially inept and stranded in a barren wasteland.