In Exit West, the narrator describes how Nadia explores the Internet: “she watched bombs falling, women exercising, men copulating, clouds gathering, waves tugging at the sand like the rasping licks of so many mortal, temporary, vanishing tongues, tongues of a planet that would one day too be no more.” (Hamid 41)
Through the usage of consonance, the repetition of -ing terms at the end of words such as “falling” and “tugging” unfolds how the globalization of the Internet gathers all subjects transparent of space and time. Video clips in the virtual space last forever; thus, they are ongoing and existing regardless of time. However, the imagery of bombs falling is no different from that of waves tugging at the sand. Because violence has become one of the mundanities in life and the Internet has overflooded views with an explosion of information, casualties are mere numbers. Building on the absurdity of the Internet experience, the narrator employs simile to draw similarities between “waves tugging at the sand” and “mortal, temporary, vanishing tongues,” in which “tongues of a planet” itself also becomes a synecdoche that represents transient (political) voices in time. The narrator suggests that since vibrations of the planet will stop in the end, all struggles for power are futile in that they are insignificant on the scale of time. Therefore, the emotion of the narrator seems relentless and nevertheless sad, reminding readers that the world exists on the impossibility of return.
Sherrie Chen (sc2289)
I really enjoy your close reading of this passage. I think you did a really good job of relating the internet to time, which is a central idea of our class. This is a dark moment in the novel that puts time at the forefront and explains a sad reality of people. Not just the people looking at the hurt but the hurt themselves and how they interrupt their own tragedies.