More Than What You See

Structuralism is about the whole of what you are analyzing and looking beneath the surface for meanings and to see what’s there. As Barry puts it in Beginning Theory, “its essence is the belief that things cannot be understood us isolation— they have to be seen in the context of the large structures they are part of.” (40) This reminds me not only of the face that most of the iceberg is beneath the surface and that the tip gives no real indication to how big or small said iceberg is, but also reminds me of what my choral director in high school taught us. We would put on a concert and that was all the audience saw. What they didn’t see was the word the choir put into it. Most text is somewhat like that, people do not always look at the text as a whole. In order to completely understand something, especially text, the key is looking at the whole text as one. If you don’t, you may miss what is just beneath the surface, so to speak, of what it is you are looking at.