Having discussed the key concepts behind meaning production and after giving an overview of Patchwork Girl and upon closer examination of the structure of several  parts of Jackson’s hypertext fiction, this section of the essay, would now serve as a personal account of my own experiences with Patchwork Girl.

    Since there were no instructions whatsoever as to how this electronic narrative should be approached, I started clicking on the first link that I chanced upon while admittedly, other readers might have opted for a more random approach. As various readers at varying times access different paths into the narrative ( bear in mind also that the reader can choose to leave out certain parts of the text or to stop reading altogether ), the effect of the entire reading process would be significantly unique to each individual.

    There are 4 main motifs or themes in Jackson’s masterpiece, namely - reproduction and sexuality, identity and embodiment, femininity and feminism as well as literary theories of intertextuality and non-linearity. Out of the 4, I was only struck by the feminist issues and the literary theories tied in very tightly with the plot. This reflects my reading style or strategy as Fish claims that “these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around”(171).

    Therefore, people who belong to the same interpretive community as I do, would form a similar understanding of the text. For others who chose not to dwell on reading up on the histories of the body part lenders ( in the section titled ‘a graveyard’ ), they might miss the images of women being oppressed.