Madden's Entry 3 - Murakami

A Wild Sheep Chase's surrealist aspects lend the book an eerie undertow. It is not an easy thing to achieve to have your reader unnerved and confused, yet interested. They way that both Murakami and Lynch are able to do this is with juxtaposition. By supplanting normal life situations with scenes with strange dream life, the material is much more effectively haunting and tantalizing in relation to the real world. In many other mystery stories, the whole emphasis of the story is directed towards solving it, its characters simply pawns on their way to the solution; the reader/viewer never strays from that straight line and isn't afforded any disassociation from the goal of the author/director. Therefore, the viewer isn't jarred but only waiting to find out the identity of the killer like in a Scooby Doo cartoon. Both Murakami and Lynch offer alternate routes on their path to solving the mystery, and even if they are all leading to the same point, it's much more fun to choose our own routes than have them dictated to us.