down on the frame, and starts to shuffle a deck of cards. He looks directly at the
viewer as he says:
Throughout his career Steinbeck experimented with different sorts of
writing, in May of 1936 right in the middle of Of Mice and Men he
gave the reason for writing what he called a play and novel form. T
think the novel is painfully dead’ he said, T ‘m going into writing for
the theatre which seems to be warming up’. Of Mice and Men was a
big hit on Broadway.
As a guide Bindy is shown both as inhabiting the world he can guide us through the
world of the characters George and Lennie depicted in the novel, and the world of the
viewer, outside the novel, and he can straddle the divide between the two.
In each of the sequences the guide addresses the viewer directly. His lexis and syntax
like his dress is informal, and he speaks directly to the audience. In each sequence he
makes direct eye contact with the imagined viewer. In each sequence he has a frontal
body posture (he turns around in the second sequence (figure 4.6 b after trying to get
the rope) and his arms and hands are on ‘show’, his face turned to the imagined
viewer. Bindy, like the character George, speaks in a measured even tone, not an
emotional one, and with a strong ‘country’ accent, and his voice has a steady quality.
The character guide Bindy, his appearance, open body posture, and country ‘twang’
are modal resources used to represented him as honest, and perhaps more importantly
as ‘authentically’ lower-working class person. The guide is placed in the role of
storyteller and through a narrative style he presents a range of information. The
narrative interludes provided by Bindy offer the reader of the ‘Novel as CD-ROM’ an
alternative view of the text. The guide introduces the need for the reader to move
beyond the text, to understand the author, the social context of the novel as well as the
need to move through the text to get at its meaning, its themes, and how it extends
other texts. He ‘suggests’ practices to the reader, to bookmark the text as they read,
to make notes, and so on. In this way the character guide Bindy structures and
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