The Color Purple Book Analysis

What I read is interwoven with who I was, who I am and who I will turn out to be. It is a way to gain perceptions on the world and a way to learn things that you would never know otherwise. The more you read, the larger your world becomes.

Personally, I am and always have been an avid reader, and I would much rather curl up with a book than watch a film. However, the more literature lessons I attend, the less sure I become of how I interpret books. I do not know if I always understand the book the way the author intended it, but I think that that is all right. I believe that a book can mean a variety of different things to different people, depending on their knowledge and frame of reference. Once a book (or poem or song or painting for that

What you get out of Disgrace is what you put into it. I think that Coetzee is making some sort of comment on man and on the politics of our country, but what we choose to get out of it is entirely up to us.

Alice Walker’s ‘The Color Purple’ follows an uneducated black woman through suffering sexual subjugation and attempts to find happiness and love in life. It was banned multiple times due to its graphical depiction of violence.

Celie says “I think it p*sses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” Shug tells Celie to imagine her God as someone she can connect to, and then takes ownership of her life.

Shug got me thinking here – can we create our own identity? Are we in charge of who we are or is it already made for us by everything around us? The question now is whether or not Alice Walker wanted us to question that. I found that the book carried with it many questions of race, religion and love. But maybe we are completely misunderstanding Walker’s

Does it really matter whether we interpret this book to be about drugs or about maths? I think that what we get out of a book is totally subjective and does not have to reflect the author’s intentions.

Another book that has several possible interpretations is George Orwell’s ‘1984’. One view is that this book was written as a futuristic book, and was meant as what the future will definitely look like. Another is that it was a warning, saying that if things continue the way in which they were going, the future could end up bearing some resemblance to what he wrote. Another interpretation is that his book was not a prediction at all; it was purely a fiction book.

I do think that it is difficult to ‘talk into a black hole.’ I think that authors are writing and writing and not enough people are reading their books and those who are perhaps are not reading deeply enough or not seeing what the author intended for the reader to see. I do not think, though, that this is a problem. I think that books are open to the reader’s interpretation and once the book has been published, the author relinquishes the sole right to own the book’s meaning because it means different things for different