There's hardly anything like worm when it comes to its relentless insistence on first person narration. A million and a half words in one person's head sounds totally unsustainable, but it works in worm (where it fails elsewhere) because it mirrors Taylor's disassociation, depersonalization, etc.
Many have noted that Taylor's power allows her a "perfect" view of fights. Through her bugs, Taylor gains a kind of weak omniscience. This way, her first person narration becomes, in turn, a kind of weak omniscient third person.
But this, too, is a facet of her trauma response. Her bugs allow her to escape the pain of her human body, but such a tactic has lasting consequences for her mental well-being. She loses the ability to easily move between this bird's-eye view of life and a more personal view, centered around her own body. She can multitask impeccably, she can forgo food and sleep with ease (to the point of being dangerously underweight), but she cannot locate her own ego within her human body.
And this pathology finds its formal counterpart in the kind of numb distance of Taylor's first person narration, where her own thoughts must struggle to burst in at the edges via the intervention of italics.
This wreaks havoc in her interpersonal relationships, as can be seen in her awkwardness with Brian. She cannot process something so deeply centralized within the body as sexuality, and so the banal embarrassment of a crush is rendered in a dull, distant first person--as though she is describing someone else entirely. The sex act itself, therefore, cannot be articulated at all, hence the total absence of it from her thoughts.
kianamaiart
pixelskylines
2087
snowghoul
