The Healer Essay Proposal

I’m interested in writing about how while I was reading The Healer by Aimee Bender, there were creepy, disturbing, and extremely troubling details such as those about Roy’s cutting that completely went over my head and that I didn’t even process until we talked about some of them in class. This makes me want to understand why these details, especially because the way Bender sets them up would make them seem important, were so easy to skim over. One way to consider this is that because Bender starts the story out as though it were a fairytale, I subconsciously was trying while I was reading to rearrange the rest of the story so it could fit into those fairytale archetypes. In order to do this, my thought processing had to emit details, like those about Roy, that disturbed the fairytale aspect.