This is your brain on books

Jeffery Karnicky brought up an interesting point in his article about the mentions of psychiatrists and the like, and the process of being analyzed. There are many moments in the novel when Renton discusses his experience with the world of therapy and address the questions that are often asked about his using, and how he cannot see the connection between his life outside of heroine and his use of heroine. It seems that this process of being analyzed is one that was created in the intellectual age of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where people are boiled down into a simplified human soup created of very distinct flavors that interact in the same way every time. Karnicky explains the book overall to be similar to the process of questioning that occurs in counseling sessions. When breaking down the book to match that process I found that it mostly makes sense. I think that there is an intense difference that lies in the candidness of the character's stream of consciousness. It is repeated throughout the novel how the typical user has an affinity and talent for lying, thus leading me to believe that, although Renton mentioned his willingness to discuss his addiction problem, any user that less than willingly seeks out the help of a specialist would fall back on their talent in order to get the only thing a user cares about. It seems to me that this novel is much less of a session in a therapists office and more like one user talking to another. To me I feel like I am addicted to theses characters lives, and as readers we are all addicted to the "story" and the process of unraveling events and characters in our mind. Reading Trainspotting, I feel like the characters, at least Renton, is aware of this in the reader, and thus they do most of the work for us. In the stream of consciousness style of writing, the character is unraveling their own thought process for us, and the reader's comes in making sense of it all and attempting to draw connections between thought and action. In this story, however, Renton is well aware of our attempts to draw these connections, and her works to show us that they may in fact not be connected at all, and a character's specific course of action or inaction be due to other forces outside the character's psychology. Leaving me to think the questions are not why/what are the reasons for using heroine, but what are the conflicts outside these characters immediate lives that brought them to this addiction?