Turn 'Em Into Flies 2 (a critique of Feed as a work of art)

Looking at Feed as a work of art, there are some aspects that I really like and some that I really don't.

One thing that I thought worked extremely well was the use of a typical teenage narrator. Tobin could have created a much more tragic atmosphere by using a narrator who could clearly see the world falling apart around them (one of the rioters, for example), but a narrator who had no idea what was going on definitely got the message across better. A narrator with too much perspective would have made it read more like a dire warning than a parallel. I also thought that the ending was particularly well done. I'm not a big fan of the actual way the book ended, but highlighting "everything must go" as the last line really drove home the sense of irony that Tobin was probably trying to convey.

That being said, I'm not particularly fond of that irony in itself. Through the medium of artwork it is almost impossible to suggest a literal solution and be taken seriously, but I still dislike it in general when people point out a problem and then stand back sadly and shake their heads at it. I also don't think that the plot necessarily did as much justice to the message as it could have. Since it was meant to be a parallel and not an exaggeration the people stayed more or less the same as they are today, but I don't think that really worked. The technology was so much more advanced, and yet it had no more effect on people than our technology has today. One of the things that people worry about with technology is the sense of disembodiment or disassociation from life that we've talked about in class--but the characters in the book were going out to parties, meeting in person, going on dates, and overall living social, in-person lives. I also thought that the addition of a personal tragedy actually took away from the deeper underlying tragedy of society--instead of mirroring it, the situation with Violet kind of overshadowed the real message.

As for Feed being a 'mirror or a hammer', I would have to say that Feed is a mirror (a metaphor that I'm about to take way too far, so I'll stop using it now). It reflects the negative aspects of the world, but offers no ideas for how to change them. With art, this reflection of the world in and of itself is a method for trying to shape it, but it has the serious flaw of only being available to those who already wanted to see it.