The Lightning Thief Reading - Reader/Protag Comparison, Opinion of First Person

 

Anaklusmos / Riptide in the movies.

Riptide as imagined by the official TLT illustrator, John Rocco.

I'm nearly done with the book. As I'm going through I keep finding more details that I've forgotten about this book...

Prompts:
• Describe the similarities and differences between the main character and you.

• What special way did the author write (for example, flashbacks, told in firstperson, multiple voice narrative, foreshadowing, lost descriptive words thatcreate visual images in your mind, etc.)? Did that make reading it better orworse? Explain.

I find that I'm somewhat similar to Percy Jackson, the protagonist of the story. Both of us are teenagers, have black hair, and tan skin. Both of us also get distracted easily, and get bored as easily. Although it's not so pronounced in my case, we both have trouble reading. Impulsivity is a problem for the two of us, although it is once again less evident for me. Both of us also tend to be tempted to act on our emotions-- he almost got himself killed when he felt like fighting Ares, the god of war, actually. I might've felt or done the same.

There are more differences between Percy and I, though. Percy has ADHD and dyslexia while I do not. Percy has green eyes-- I have brown. He is also considered a delinquent, and is rather outgoing, both of which I am not. The biggest difference is that he is courageous, while I usually feel like crawling into a corner whenever someone starts getting angry, no matter how harmless they are. Oh, and he's half-god, but that is of fiction only, meaning I will never have that similarity with him. Although if I was, I would like to be a son of Athena or Hades...

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I'd like to talk about how Rick Riordan uses first person from Percy's perspective for the entire series.
Before I started reading this series, I read Harry Potter, which used a third person view in its writing, mainly focusing on Harry. Sometimes it would show the story from a different person's viewpoint, usually only at the beginning of a book in the series.
When I started reading TLT for the first time, I was rather shocked-- I've never read a story in first-person before. Although I like books, my collection of novels was rather small, and all of them were written in third-person. It was refreshing, though— I liked having a sarcastic juvenile delinquent narrate a death quest. I feel like the series would have a lot less spunk if Percy hadn't narrated.

The Lightning Thief Reading - Connections and Tiny Details

Some Percabeth art. I still find it surreal that I had the idea to search Tumblr for art to put on this blog post, and that I followed through with it.

This is the 5th or 4th time I've read Percy Jackson and the Olympians - The Lightning Thief, but it is probably only the 3rd time I'll be finishing it.

This time through, I noticed that a character who is first formally introduced in The Last Olympian, the goddess Hestia, was actually acknowledged to exist in the first book.

The Lightning Thief, page 80

Hestia is the goddess of the hearth. She tends the campfire flames in Camp Half-Blood, and prefers to take the form of a human girl. She is rarely recognized as a goddess by any of the campers. All of thid checks in with the description Percy gives in the page above. This little detail here makes me wonder if Rick Riordan, the author, had planned the entire series from the start.

There are more small details that I noticed, which foreshadow the identity of Percy's godly father. There are plenty which do just that, but these two are ones I only noticed in this reading. The first is when Percy faces the Minotaur while it was raining. Drenched in water, Percy gains a sudden boost in energy, and kills the Minotaur with its own horn. It is never directly said that the rain was what gave Percy the extra energy.

The second detail that I hadn't noticed is during sword practice, when Percy mimics Luke by pouring a bucket of ice water on himself because it looked like a good idea to him. This gives him yet more extra energy, giving himself a chance against Luke. He then manages to perform the disarming maneuver Luke had demonstrated. However, when asked to do that again, the energy boost had already worn off, and Percy is easily defeated.

It seems that pouring ice water on his head had become a major part of his routine before practicing, as noted by Chiron in a version of the official PJO website that I can't seem to find.