One thing I haven’t touched on to any depth is the characters and their relationships to each other. Obviously Ham, as the main character and first person narrator is exposed by his perspective of the story which is all we really have to go on. But through his relationships we see the other characters in two ways: how Ham thinks of them and how we instead might interpret them through reported dialogue or action.
So I’m not crazy about his girlfriend, Pen.
He is, and that’s perhaps where I see most clearly the separation of writer/character to be necessary, even more so than the reader/character situation. In simpler terms, it’s the "I’d never do that" effect. The writer then, is allowing the character to behave in a manner that perhaps most readers would not, and more importantly, he would not.
Through conversations and meetings and reunions we may judge for ourselves the relationships and certain things become clear by reinforcement–which often comes at odd times when you’re dealing with hypertext, and always at different times for different readers. For example, it’s obvious that Ham loves Pen, Ham and McKenna are good friends, and that Ham and his "sister" Maria were and will always share a bond. In Ham’s relationship with Pen, however, I find my acceptance of her free and easy ways to be self-centered. She is a user. She also loves Ham and likely seeks him out whenever she needs to find whatever it is she’s looking for. And then she leaves.
What makes me wonder about how much I am influenced by the nature of hypertext is that since time is efficiently available at command–past, present, future all at a click–it may seem to me that Pen’s comings and goings are one thing, away a long time, back for a minute and gone again. And as I follow Ham’s life in between these spaces, when Pen comes back it is almost an intrusion and I think I resent her for that.
And perhaps it is only because of my own reading style in the hypertext environment that Pen behaves as she does.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology