Making Distinctions

First, one of the parts that stuck out to me, too, was the part on pg. 150 about how the uncanny is the line where fantasy and reality is blurred. I find it interesting, and eerie, when you can’t make that distinction. Honestly, it freaks me out. Ghosts and all that being my biggest fear, the supernatural and what not, that would make a certain amount of sense to be “uncanny” to me, as some argue ghosts to be real and others find them to be entirely fictitious. That being said, some of the discussion in the text freaked me out a little bit, but I am a wimp. But at the same time, I am always fascinated by it. While ghosts are my biggest fear, sometimes I like to indulge in watching Ghost Hunters or Most Haunted Castles or whatever. But I digress.

The other aspect of the reading that I found particularly interesting was on page 140-141 that says “According to [Jentsch] we have particularly favourable conditions for generating feelings of the uncanny if intellectual uncertainty is aroused as to whether something is animate or inanimate, and whether the lifeless bears an excessive likeness to the living.” I find that intriguing because if I could write something that is so ambiguous that could resemble something to be both lifeless as well as living, I would be impressed with myself. For a reader, I think it would be disconcerting because it would make them jump back and forth and question what they believe as they are reading. It is the intellectual uncertainty that Jentsch speaks of that really penetrates a person’s psyche and freaks them out a little.