The Ha-Ha by Dave King

Images play in my mind like a movie as I read the text off the pages of a book.  The book is the script.  My mind, the director.  I take full control over the pictures I see, adapting a detail here or there to fit my own experiences and perceptions.  That movie is always playing for me from the beginning of the novel to the end, pausing only when I lose focus of the story or when I put the book down to move onto another part of my daily life.

I was both fascinated and shocked to learn that not all people create images in their minds while they read.  Ignorantly, I did not even consider this to be a skill that some have to learn ~ because for me forming that movie comes innately and naturally.

This revelation came to me after an in-depth conversation with a colleague of mine where we were planning a literary unit on imagery for our fourth graders.  She had stated to me that one of the heads of our own reading department does not visualize.  The conversation really left me perplexed and full of questions and wanting to learn more.  If images are not created, then how does that reader grasp what's happening in the story?  How does she form meaning out of words without pictures to associate them with?  We teach imagery or visualization to our students as a comprehension tool.  Foolishly, I have always gone into this unit with the assumption that all readers do this anyway.  I have always seen these lessons as a way for my students to reinforce this "natural" skill and create more detailed pictures in their minds.  But now I know that not to be true.

The Ha-Ha by Dave King allows for great visualization.  This is a beautiful story full of symbolism and emotion about a broken man who struggles to redefine the meaning of his life through the bonds he creates with a nine-year old boy, Ryan, and his housemates.  After serving 16 days overseas in the Army, Howie suffers a traumatic brain injury leaving him unable to speak or write.  Frustration, anger, and physical violence often surface as consequences of his trauma.  When his ex-girlfriend suddenly leaves for drug rehab, Howie finds himself caring for her son Ryan who brings joy and fresh perspective to Howie's life.  Unexpectedly, Howie finds the love, friendship, security, and purpose that has been missing for so long in his troubled existence; but he knows that this arrangement is short-lived.  Howie commiserates over the eventuality that Ryan will soon be going home to his mother, leading him to make several unwise decisions.

Some of Howie's choices manifest in the form of physical violence, which the author describes in a degree of particularity that easily provides me with a mental picture.  Howie's scar, home, neighborhood, housemates, and experiences all played out for me because I was able to visualize the story based on the detail in the text and my own personal experiences.  One detail, and a major one, that I had trouble imagining was the "ha-ha," which the book defines as "a kind of trick of the eye that conceals a break in the landscape."  Because I have never personally seen nor heard of a ha-ha, I had to form a picture in my mind using only the text as a guide.

Clearly, how I imagine the story is different from how another reader may visualize or not visualize it depending upon what type of a reader we are and what type of experiences we've had.  Because mental pictures from one reader to another vary, perceptions too will vary.  I perceived this novel as a type of rollercoaster, moving from dark moods to lighter ones back to dark again but always with a lingering hope for a positive outcome.  Although I had trouble picturing it, I still perceived the symbolic purpose of the term "ha-ha."  I also perceived the symbolic purpose in a character named Timothy.  More importantly I perceived this novel as a model of acceptance for who we are and for the talents we have been given.