At first when I started reading Crank I was just flying through the book. I was reading at a very surface level in the sense I was just reading the words on the page. I did notice of course that the words were disjointed, that they sometimes formed shapes that seemed to correspond to what was being talked about on that particular page. But I didn't really do much deconstructing of the text and the language beyond that.
I unfortunately missed the Deconstructive Theory presentation, but I'm sure it was wonderful. So I had to do some digging through the chapter to get caught up, and I helped myself out, as it is a pretty hefty complicated theory, with some useful Wikipedia advice. I found the following on Wikipedia: "Deconstruction generally attempts to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction). That made it a bit easier for me. So after doing that I changed the way I read Crank about halfway through. I started reading for these different interpretations that were parts of a whole. This made the reading so much more interesting in ways. For example, on page 195, the chapter called "I slithered down the hall," could be broken down using deconstructive theory. I read the whole thing first as a complete text. I then read just the words on the left hand side of the page. There were gaps that my mind filled in, but really were missing words that made it seem incomplete. The emphasis on the left, the message I got was the story of a girl washing in a shower, her leg infected, and she is angry and sad. If I opened the book just to this page and read, it would be unclear as to whether the angry purple welt she describes is a bruise from being beaten by Adam, an old wound of sorts, or something else (like the tattoo that we know it to be). But the interesting part for me was when I read just the words on the right hand side of the page: "shed...skin...found...Kristina...beneath" (195). Taken in context with the title of the page, it was like a mini poem of a metaphor of a girl to a snake. In context with the story this made the fragmentation of her mind even more profound. She was Bree in Albuquerque, but she takes a shower in Reno, and literally washes that self away with the dust and dirt and everything else.
I continued to read the story in this way, picking apart the different meanings and constructions behind the language. I didn't go so far as to decipher individual words, and what their meaning could be, what we assume their meaning is, and then the other meanings that may linger behind that which add layers to the understanding of the story and the message, but I found this as a really interesting, if not overwhelming at times, way to read a text. I would be intimidated to teach this particular theory to secondary students myself without some further instruction and help getting a handle of the theory, and I would worry that they would find it time-consuming and tedious and horror of all horrors...boring. But I really liked the text, and liked experimenting with the theory.
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I also noticed the nature of justification of text (right-hand, centered, left-hand) in this text, and found that they were often stand-alone subtexts with their own, complete messages. This occurs in the volume's first chapter of verse, "Introduction," which includes the phrase "I am the face in the mirror only not. I swerved recklessly picked up speed to madness." When read in conjunction with the left-hand justified text, these words seem to convey a sense of confusion and loss of control. On their own, however, they are the words of a strong and confident, if deranged, voice. They are seemingly the words of a different person, and yet they are actually isolated elements of the whole. Deconstructive theory would not necessarily espouse a conclusion either way, so it is fitting that we have evidence for either interpretation. There is indication that right-hand justification serves as an indication of a person speaking who is not Kristina—take for example that the words of her father, mother, and Adam are always right-hand justified. And yet the words of others are always in italics. The mixed conventions of unitalicized, right-hand justified text leaves this issue uncertain; could it be that this uncertainty in Kristina/Bree's identity the very aim of this writing move?
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