The first day of class Professor McCoy introduced us to a tweet called the suspicious pants. That day we were placed into groups and were told to unpack the meaning behind the suspicious pants. As Jessica referred in her blog post titled A Reflection on Suspicious Pants, Professor McCoy told use “Suspicious Pants is all of Percival Everett’s writings in one tweet”. At the time I did not know what this meant, but now two months later I have been able to have further information to allow me to relate the suspicious pants and Everett and what they have in common.
A couple weeks ago in class we were told to find interviews of Percival Everett and get a background of him as a writer. I found one particular interview that caught my attention. Within the interview he proceeded to talk about his past books,and the role the setting and characters play. The one topic that caught my attention was when he brought up the concept of irony, and its role within novels. “I certainly understand that. I don’t want to sound ironic, but I believe personally the opposite. Every time I finish a book, I know less than when I started. I think I know something when I start writing and, as the problems I approach become more complex and interesting I realize that everything I thought I knew was wrong. And that’s the exciting part about writing novels”. This is where my mind automatically connected suspicious pants.
As Everett was saying that the more you engage in a topic, or read further into a novel, you are not learning more he says you are learning less than what you started with. This comes from the idea that the more you acquire the more ideas there are to interpret,leaving you with questions left to be answered. When looking at the suspicious pants tweet, you start by looking at the tweet and seeing just a pair of pants. As you continue to stop and look over the tweet you then may read the caption, in this case it reads suspicious pants. Then after reading what the tweeter has wrote to symbolize their interpretation of the pants, you rethink your analysis of the pants and look at it in a new way. You may now see the pants in a suspicious way, you may ask yourself why is it being suspicious, are they themselves being suspicious or is it someone or something else causing the pants to be suspicious. There are endless amount of questions that emerge from this caption, suspicious pants. The irony seen within this tweet relates back to what Everett had brought up within his novels. That you now know less than what you initially started with. You no longer just see a pair of pants you now see suspicious pants that lead to more extended questions going off of it. This is ironic because most may think the more you read the more you know,or the more you understand, which Everett points out, is not always the case.
As you read your next novel, blog post, or even social media, stop and ask yourself what more do you wonder, what more don’t you know. There is so much in this world that brings us to the ironic situation of knowing less after digging in deeper. As the semester goes on, I know will be able to not only connect Everett’s case on irony of knowing less, but also being able to take a simple suspicious pants tweet and relate it to multiple novels I will read in the future.