Zone One Mapping

Personally, I did not find this mappin tool to be too much help. I can understand in some cases where mapping out locations can be beneficial. I do not believe that it needed to be done for this book. Throughout the book, Mark Spitz is jumping around from memory to real life, but the locations are generally the same. His memories mostly take place in his home town of Hempstead or in New York City. The locations themselves do not vary too much. I also do not believe that locations are too important to the story, the same way that days of the week and time are not that important. The normal institution and way of life does not mean anything now. The name of places may give the reader a sense of direction but at the end of the day the only place you really need to know is New York City. Mapping out the locations did not help me see much more than what I had already known. When we were reading, A Journal of A Plague Year, I think mapping that out was crucial. H.F. was constantly going from parish to parish, and to different stores and pubs. Location was extremely important to that novel due to the fact that that the book itself was trying to map out locations without using a map. The book essentially wanted you to take the information that it gave you and map it yourself. When we mapped out that novel it allowed me to follow the story better, and gave me a better understanding of what London looked like. Many of the students in the class have been to the city and have a general understanding of what it looks like. I have also lived in Long Island my entire life and have been to the city countless times. Hempstead is also no more than 20 minutes from my house. If someone who isn’t familiar with the Northeast read this, especially New York City I think it would be very beneficial to map the novel out. The map does not give us any context that we did not already know. I think it can help you connect certain stories within the story itself, which can be beneficial to most. It could also potentially help the reader plot points of importance, and helps the reader to not sway too far from the action. Sometimes I feel that books do bounce around a lot to try and keep the reader entertained. The negative to doing that is that the reader may lose focus on the real plot or theme of the story. I completely understand the purpose of mapping out the locations and to help increase someone’s knowledge of the book, but I do not believe that helped me or changed my perspective of the story at all. My mapping may just be more of an illustration of what occurred during the book. If I had tried digging deeper, maybe I could have gotten more out of it. Maybe if I had tried looking at the story from a different perspective then my map would have come out differently and could have changed my understanding.