Victory Gardens

Labyrinths

Labyrinth may be a metaphor for the construction of self or the effort needed to understand 'the other'. Labyrinths often serve as a metaphor for the journey of life. There are extensive dream sequences in Victory Gardens which obviously suggest an exploration of the psyche.

Maps and pathways

The map pages in Victory Gardens serve to confuse rather than to guide.

There is no overall Storyspace map which would have allowed the reader to follow the construction of the text.

The reader is disempowered by the text rather than empowered. It is a very large hypertext, with almost 1,000 short 'writing spaces', the hypertext equivalent of pages, and more than 2,800 links. (11)

Some writing spaces have large numbers of links, which can be selected by clicking on 'links' but which may cause the text to branch off at a tangent into a new story-line. For instance 'Watch My Back' has twelve links. Some writing spaces have identical names, others have similar or related names, all of which make navigation more complex.