Feeling Our Way Through

I’m intrigued by the instances of the “almost” and how words like “seems”, “feels”, and “apparently” are working with, or against, the pace of Green’s novel thus far. An interesting moment of almost happens on pg. 25: “what she saw made her giggle and her mouth almost soundless.”  The negation of commas increases the rapidity of how we read the sentence and overwhelms our initial capacity to visualize what the description conveys.  At once, the accelerated speed could potentially trap us in our re-reading and, in turn, momentarily slow the pace of the text. Conversely, this haste suggests that perhaps the content of the sentence should not be the focus but we should rather observe the feeling of the sentence. In this sense, the feeling is urgent and our eyes are, as a result, are conveniently guided to the abrupt slap of the hand, a point of contact. This notion of action or point of contact relates back to the lack of punctuation in our initial sentenced observed. The seeming ease contradicts the disjointed meanings of the words; “what she saw made her giggle mouth open and almost giggle” doesn’t exactly make any sense. The context of the second sentence aids in our construction of meaning but words like almost, in cases like these, suggest that the sentence questions its own meaning. This underlying notion of question haunts the sentence structure and thwarts a consistent reading of the pace. Is there an understandably flow or are these “almost” obscuring the realities or actions of the sentences with what it means to “feel” about a sentence, different from a sentence’s tone.