Emma’s Documentation Blog

Color Swatch Assignment

“Story of Your Life”

• Introduces the story with a mother telling her child the story of how they were conceived and how they were to grow up, almost speaking as if it hasn’t happened yet
• Skips to Dr. Banks being called in by Colonel Weber and Gary Donnelly, a physicist, to identify the linguistics of aliens that had appeared on Earth
• It is then revealed that that call would be the second most important phone call of her life and the first would be a call about identifying the daughter at a morgue.
• This reveals to the reader that the story being told is to the daughter after her untimely death, all the things that weren’t said when she was alive
• Gary and the author worked together at a site to communicate with the aliens
• They meet simulations of the heptapods and try and communicate with them, distinguishing basic sounds as their language
• Jumps to an anecdote about her teaching and how the alien experience wasn’t her favorite but child linguistics
• Goes into an anecdote about an experience with her daughter
• Keeps jumping between progress with the aliens and anecdotes about her daughter
• The progress with understanding the aliens is slow, mostly due to the configuration of their written language
• Not picture writing but writing that “conveys meaning without reference to speech”
• They made the connection that there seemed to be two different languages, one spoken and one written that didn’t have any correspondence with each other
• Started to get into the physics and mathematical discussions and ended up with no progress, the linguists, on the other hand, seemed to understand the language more and more
• They had a breakthrough with the physics communication, explained the way light moves which is more complicated than what they thought they were going to start with
• The heptapod’s version of physics was opposite to humans
• They also found that the written language had to have a foundation to build off of when forming the sentences
• She started feeling more comfortable with Heptapod B, the written language, and could form the structures in her head
• Same physical world, two different interpretations
• Jumps from talking about the daughter’s death to anecdotes about her life, somehow relating to the topics discussed about the heptapods
• They came to the conclusion of heptapod’s language being performative
• The Colonel arranged for a gift exchange between them which ended in an abrupt ending and absence of the heptapods