Sunday, 19 February 2012

What if graphic design was affected by dementia symptoms? 5






BOOK NARRATIVE AFFECTED BY MEMORY LOSS 3
A Delicate Balance is a play about a family and their friends. I chose one of the characters to have Alzheimer’s disease: Tobias, the father of the family. He progressively forgets the other characters, starting with his friends, his sister-in-law, then his daughter. By the end of the book he is only able to recognize himself, and, from time to time, his wife.
Each of the three acts in the play represents one of the three stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
In the early stage / act 1, Tobias can always recognize Agnes. Sometimes he forgets Julia (daughter) and Claire (sister-in-law) and, more often, his friends, Harry and Edna.
In the moderate stage / act 2, Tobias still knows Agnes most of the time; he recognizes Claire and Julia just a few times and Edna and Harry only once or twice. When a character speaks for a long time he also tunes out.
In severe stage / act 3, Tobias cannot follow more than 3 or 4 lines of speech. He is also unable to keep a conversation going. He is starting to have some difficulty recognizing Agnes. The other characters are not there anymore.
Experiment developed with 2nd hand book A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee, 1969, Penguin Books.

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