Planet of the Apes Question A

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The book opens with two characters, Jinn and Phyllis, finding a message in a bottle. We return to them at the end – had you forgotten about them? Did your perception of them change from the beginning to the end? What did you think of using these two as a framing device? Jinn and Phyllis learn about Ulysse from a message in a bottle in which Ulysse describes travelling with his family – when was the message written? Why was the story so unbelievable to them?

Comments

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    Yes, I had forgotten about them, and loved the twist that they turned out to be apes themselves. An excellent device, and highlights the whole human/ape inversion that we follow in a bit more detail in the interior story. And very neatly written at the start so that there was no clue as to their true identity, so (insofar as one remembered their existence at all) one assumed because of our own prejudices that they were human.
    The timescales were a bit hard to follow - not the interior timescales within each of the frame and internal stories, but the duration of the space flights meant that there were very long spans of time at the gaps between frame and interior, and I got a bit lost there (but then, it didn't really matter as the exact count of years was kind of unimportant).

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    I think I saw the "twist", of Jinn and Phylis being apes, in the first section. I think that's why the frame story didn't add anything to me. I expect it was meant to be here to change what we thought of as the "fantasy" in the story as we were reading it.

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    No I didn't forget them. I figured that Boule just wanted to make a point that most readers assumed Jinn and Phylliss were human, and then immediately experience that that assumption might well be mistaken. You know, in case they missed the "satire."

    But do tell - what has this to do with L'Engle?

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    @BarnerCobblewood said:
    But do tell - what has this to do with L'Engle?

    as in Madeline?
    Aha I've got it now - Swiftly Tilting Planet was the link. Sorry to be so slow...

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    Sadly, I don't have a l'Engle connection. I was just trying to work in the ideas of Swift and being off-kilter (hence 'tilting') and that's what came out.

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    I knew they were apes right away, and thought it was a bad frame story. I didn't read the book to the end so I did not know they were mentioned again.

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