Metacognition: Jane Eyre

Having just finished reading Charlotte Bronte's classic Jane Eyre, I've noticed that I read it in a slightly different way than I read books like Heart of Darkness and Sophie's World, which were both on our curriculum earlier in the year. Whether a good or bad change, I read Jane Eyre with a highly reduced attention to detail.

Now this can be dangerous with books like the two previously mentioned, but in Jane Eyre, I found myself zoning out of the lengthy descriptions of an orchard or a dress, for example, and still getting full credit on all my reading quizzes and being able to follow along in all class discussions. And I genuinely can't tell if this is something that will come back and take revenge on me in the post-reading assignments, or if it really is a book that has a storyline which stands without all the fluffy extra bits.

Because after all, the book was written in a time when people didn't have TVs and iPods and cell phones or even cars to take them places for entertainment, so their books could be long and the details were the only interesting images they had access to. But in our society, we have millions of images flashed across our faces in picture format, 24/7. We don't need the three-page long descriptions of someone's hair to keep us interested; we can just check google images to see exactly what auburn curls look like. If anything, lengthy descriptions just cause our increasingly shortened attention spans to wander away from what we're trying to focus on.

Therefore, I was surprised and glad to find that Jane Eyre remains a decent story, even when I only skimmed the parts that bored me, and that I didn't seem to be missing anything major. I won't lie, the entire beginning of the book seemed to be a combination of Cinderella and Harry Potter when I skated through the details, but it got more interesting and suspenseful as it went on, and my attention to detail probably responded accordingly.

My main goal is to avoid falling into the trap of applying this "strategy" of sorts to everything I read, just because of this one success. If I were to have skipped over details in Heart of Darkness, I would have failed every quiz and not understood anything that happened in the story because the entire book is based around complex imagery. But as long as I can regard this as an isolated instance of success in "functional laziness" (as Mr. Williams calls it), I can guarantee that I'll never have to see a negative side to this process of thought.