Hey friends,

Let’s do some weekend textual analysis together. 

Here’s what I’m thinking… I’m still playing around with ideas for how I want to create a virtuous cycle of reading and creating to reclaim attention, deep thought, and artistic exploration. 

As I’ve been mulling it over and starting to scaffold out the reading list I mentioned in the previous issue of the newsletter, one thing that has stood out to me is that (a) my writing counterintuitively thrives under imposed constraints and (b) I think I peaked in undergrad when my coursework required doing consistent technical analysis as a means of better understanding how prose works. 

So, what I want to do today is critically analyze my most recent read– Dungeon Crawler Carl– and talk about a few passages from the book, what’s interesting about the prose within them, and see how I might infuse those learnings into my own writing. 

Minor spoilers ahead. 

The first pages of any book have to meaningfully engage readers such that they want to continue reading, introduce some of the main characters, and set the stage for the coming conflict. If a book fails to do this, readers are likely to put it down, meaning that earlier on in the journey to publication, agents and editors have likely already passed on it, too. 

Here’s how Dinniman starts Dungeon Crawler Carl, 

From the first sentence, Dinniman creates a sense of intrigue that pulls you in as a reader and makes curious as to what he’s talking about. What is this transformation he refers to? And then the very next line, we learn that whatever this transformation is, it led to mass instantaneous death. 

So, right away, there are stakes. In Lisa Cron’s Story Genius, she talks about how a missed phone call in a well-written story can create tension better than the apocalypse, but in this case, the apocalypse is pretty compelling. 

Okay– the apocalypse has happened, and this guy has survived because he was outside. 

Not only is Carl a survivor, but we also start to get a sense of who he is as a person. He opines about how the people who died instantaneously are the lucky ones, which suggests to us that he’s not a survival-at-all-costs kind of guy. 

We also get the sense that he’s somewhat of a comedic character. He’s outside in the freezing cold in his boxers, a leather jacket, and ill-fitting pink Crocs. That’s not your standard action hero. 

Reading a bit further, you learn that he’s outside because his ex-girlfriend’s award-winning show cat, Princess Donut, has escaped and is in a tree, and he’s trying to coax her down. 

Between the way Carl describes himself and the presence of a character named Princess Donut, you know you’re not in for a by-the-numbers apocalyptic survival novel. 

In his book Solutions for Writers, Sol Stein explains that opening paragraphs have three core functions. He writes, “The ideal goals of an opening paragraph are: 1. To excite the reader's curiosity, preferably about a character or a relationship. 2. To introduce a setting. 3. To lend resonance to the story.”

Resonance, in this context, refers to creating the sense that what’s happening on the first page has implications that extend beyond the page itself– that it’s part of a larger, messier narrative that extends beyond the temporal confines of the book (i.e., was preceded by something in the world of the story, of which it is a direct consequence, and will have an ramifications on what is to come after). 

Considering Stein’s checklist for the first paragraph: 

Reading through the book also reminded me of some of the tactics for effective first-person narration. In my own writing, I find that I am prone to filtering language, in which the events described in the prose are viewed through the narrator's perspective. For example, “I saw the sun rise over the hillside” and “the sun rose over the hillside” convey essentially the same thing, but the first filters the sun's rising through what the narrator notices. 

Filtering language can be used effectively at times, but when over-relied upon, it can slow down the narrative and take readers out of the story. It also tends to tell rather than show. 

Consider this passage from near the end of Part One of the book. 

In that first paragraph, Carl filters the narration– I stared– because it intentionally brings the reader into Carl’s mind. We are staring at the world through his eyes as he utters a go fuck yourself to the symbol of the entities behind his suffering. 

But then, in the second paragraph, the text immediately reverts to unfiltered language. Imagine if that second paragraph had been written as, “Instead of the gate opening like last time, I saw a blinding flash of light. I felt nauseous and disoriented, and then started to feel like I was falling.” 

I saw, I felt, started to feel like I [...] are constructions that could convey the same information to us, but in a way that is slower and clunkier, making the narrative feel less like a real event we are experiencing. 

As I sat down to write this issue, I thought about how to situate Dungeon Crawler Carl within dystopian battle-royale literature, such as The Hunger Games or the eponymous Battle Royale. In all three works, contestants within a game that is orchestrated by an external power must compete in kill-or-be-killed contests in hope of survival or some kind of reward. Any time there are megacorporations, extreme concentrations of political power, and televised fights to the death, there’s room for applying multiple theoretical paradigms– Marxist, feminist, and post-colonial, namely– to the text as a means of highlighting the commodification of exploitation and violence inherent to these types of narratives, and Dungeon Crawler Carl is no different. 

But a close reading of Dinniman’s work and a review of the literature on the battle royale subgenre didn’t yield as much overlap or insight as I expected, likely because, while Dungeon Crawler Carl borrows extensively from the genre, it’s not a true battle royale. The crawlers could all survive, in theory, though the games are designed to ensure their eventual destruction. 

Where the conventions of the battle royale genre are illuminating for Dungeon Crawler Carl are the roles of community, hope, and the preservation of humanity. 

“Dystopian Games: Diagnosing Modernity as the Scene of Tests, Trials and Transformations” by Tom Boland, an article in the Cultural Sociology journal, looks at the role of gamified exploitation in The Hunger Games and Squid Games and writes,

The same is true for Carl, and it plays out through the alliance he forms with the staff of a senior care facility that has entered the dungeon, the conflict with player-killers Maggie My and Frank Q, and Carl’s recurring verbalization of his fears of becoming a monster through his participation in the game. 

Plenty has been written about dystopian fiction operating as a critique of capitalism and unfettered neoliberalism. Having a stand-in for humankind subjected to an absolute system of control in which they must kill or be killed for the entertainment of others intentionally forces readers to consider their own comfort with the commodification of violence and where their own limits and boundaries would be in a similar situation. Dungeon Crawler Carl amplifies this critique by making clear that the entities behind the competition are intergalactic mega-corporations and that airing the games is intended to make money for these corporations and partnering governments. But the fact that Carl’s story reads like a video game adds an interesting layer of nuance to this interpretation. 

He has stats, a map, hotkeys, health bars, and loot boxes. Even the term used for people who are competing to survive– crawlers– is a specific reference to video game culture and the notion of “dungeon crawlers” as a subgenre of role-playing games in which characters navigate labyrinths, mazes, puzzles, and other contained spaces in search of loot or the fulfillment of a quest. 

While competitions like The Hunger Games and Squid Game are structured as broadcast games akin to reality TV events, Dungeon Crawler Carl operates more like a contemporary streamer who broadcasts video gameplay online. 

In a video game, someone controls the player characters. When streamers go live on Twitch or YouTube, audiences come for both the player's personality and the specific content of the video game they’re playing. Dungeon Crawler Carl is the first book in an extended series, but the fact that it reads like a video game creates distinct differences from other dystopian competitors and raises an important question: who is behind the controller? 

Like literary analysis? I’m trying new things for the newsletter. Expect ongoing experimentation and let me know your thoughts. Have you read Dungeon Crawler Carl yet?