The way language is presented and the choices available can make a reader truly understand and empathize with the main character. In Will Not Let Me Go, the reader takes the role of an aging man with Alzheimer’s. The piece first starts out saying that the game will remember where you are, and as the text fades, ‘remember’ stands out a little longer to give a hint as to whats to come. The reader is then launched into the scene of a funeral. People are sad nearby the main character, Fred, but he feels he is only there since he is expected to be. He also has no idea who is next to him despite some physical similarities. What the reader does not realize at this crucial moment is that the person who has died is Fred’s wife, and the man next to Fred is his son, and he has no memory of who they are.
This beginning launches the reader into the realization that if he does not recognize his own family, then there must be a problem with his memory. The story then reverts back in time to when the problem first started, letting the reader connect deeply with Fred by making decisions for him. Fred will either cope his ever growing memory problem, or lash out and become aggressive to everyone and everything that slightly bothers him. As a reader, one must make a decision that seems the best given the limited context since Fred begins not to remember anything.
As time progresses, it reaches a point to where the text just gives you snippets of whats occurring as Fred barely even knows what is going on around him. Even after he lapses back into a period of partial stability, he does not even remember his own family who come to see him, creating an ever furthering burden upon them that he regrets causing.
As the text becomes more sporadic and confused, it is a representation of the evocative meaning that Fred is not in tune to what is happening. This is similar to the idea that My Father’s Long, Long Legs has a meaning that is evoked from the way the story unfolds. Will Not Let Me Go cleverly immerses the reader in a world that might otherwise be hard to understand, conclusively showing how the use of language and choices can allow the reader to connect to a main character in unfamiliar circumstances.