Week 7: Network Analysis

The short story “Eight Trains” portrays the narrator’s encounters with people during the daily commute by trains. The essence of the story is encapsulated in a sentence from the story: “It’s (human reality) all pre-planned”. All people the narrator encounters are the unchanged elements within her life, rather than something “simulat[ing] the chaos of life”, as the narrator describes. Therefore, the people who appear in the story revolve around the narrator rather than interact randomly between each other.
The network graph of the people’s connections in the story embodies the statement perfectly. As one can see in the graph, all nodes represented as the people the narrator encounters in the story are connected only to the narrator in the center.

It is more interesting to draw the connections between the people and the places where the encounters take place. The nodes are then separated into three subsets. It is fascinating to notice that only the first half of the commute through eight trains are selected, possibly emphasizing the fact that the first half of the commute leaves a greater impression on the narrator. Also, the appearance of the “Homeless Man” as the central node corresponds to the significance of the character in the story, who appears both in the beginning and the end that marks the theme of the inflexibility of a repetitious life.

The network graph, however, does have its limit in that it cannot point out the significance of connections between the people and the narrator or between the people and the places. For example, one cannot tell what impacts certain characters have on the narrator’s life, or in what contexts certain characters appear in certain places. Such lack of dimensions prevents one who has not read the story from fully grasping the dynamics of the story.