Super Sad True Love Story

Number one: The Apparat. In the near future smart-phones evolved into a hand-held device that governs everything in your life from ranking your personality and appearance so that others know what to except of you to telling you all of major news that you absolutely have to know. So important is the device that it is essential that you wear your apparat around your neck at all times and if you are seen without the device or still carrying an older model, you are mocked. Shteyngart’s dystopian novel almost revolve around the apparat in that, the abandonment of books and reading, the forfeiting of personal privacy and rights, the pornifing of relationships, the inability to construct proper sentences and so on can all to credited to it. The functions of the apparat include news cast, socializing, and communication, while the real life adjacents are TV/Internet, Facebook/MySpace and smart-phones. To Shetyngart, the apparat is the future if we keep going down the current road. A road of which we use the web for all information, and in turn “trained” by the internet to only assimilate the superficial and keep away from the profound. A road of which people went from writing personal letters to writing short emails to sending texts with no regards for proper writing and to breaking the news to someone that his grandmother had passed away, on Facebook.
Number Two: Reading. “Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years.” We are in a post-modern and also post-literate age, but not to the extent of the novel yet. Reading is difficult, especially online, just as Nicholas had said himself about the times when he tried to read on his computer. The post-modern-human is constantly bombarded with distractions when he reads on the computer and online, yet internet provides much easier access to books and readings that it