I chose the story Boathouse by Jon Fosse. The main character is a lady who is over thirty years old, feels alone, and feels that she hasn’t made much of life. She loves music and has started a band with a high school teacher named Torkjell and started a rock band with her childhood friend Knut. She begins to take on writing to contain her restlessness, and talks about this restlessness reoccurring when she meets Knut again. She has not seen Knut in ten years, and meets him again when he is married and has two kids. The nodes I selected are the characters in the story, which comprise of the lady, her mother, the high school teacher Torkjell, Knut, Knut’s wife, Knut’s two daughters, and the person Knut danced with. Two characters (nodes) are connected if they know each other and had an encounter with each other (edges or links).
In this network, the Lady and Knut seem most connected based on degree centrality. However, this may not be the case in actuality because this network is based off relationships only known by the lady. In a larger network perhaps reflecting the entire community, Torkjell may be the most connected because of his reach as a high school teacher (just a hypothesis).
Limitations that the network graph may have include the closeness of relationships as well as further relationships that may not have been specified in the story. To highlight the closeness of each relationship, we must determine criteria such as number of years of number of encounters and then attribute a closer relationship to a thicker link or weighted edge. I would assume Knut would be much closer to his wife than the lady narrator (as Knut has not seen the lady in so long even though they were childhood friend); that means the link between Knut and his wife would be thicker than that of Knut and the lady. However, we do not know this for sure; Knut and the lady may have been best of friends and what if Knut was actually not that close to his wife.
Regarding unspecified relationships, Knut has become a music teacher; perhaps, he has collaborated with Torkjell as well. Perhaps the lady has indeed bumped into Knut’s wife and daughters beforehand without knowing it. Perhaps one of Knut’s daughters was taking one of Torkjell’s classes in high school. There are so many possibilities for connections; solely given connections from her perception may not paint the whole picture.
Network analysis is very interesting as you discover that so many people are unexpectedly connected with each other or are close neighbors (six degrees of separation and three degrees of influence).
Hi,
I totally agree that just looking at the connections are not enough to understand the full picture of each relationship. I like that you took the story and thought of possible hypotheses for some of the relationships based on your interpretations of the narrative.