-I've written papers on "Little did he know." I used to teach a class based on "Little did he know." I mean, I once gave an entire seminar based upon "Little did he know."-So says Dustin Hoffman's character Professor Hilbert in the movie Stranger Than Fiction.
While I realize this post could easily fall into a Film and Foto Friday (oh one of these days I'll actually get things straight--on second thought scratch that, won't happen, not the way my brain is wired...again though I digress.), I feel it works here as well because the whole premise of the movie is novelistic.
For those of you who haven't seen the movie here is the plot in a nutshell:
An author is writing a novel; the main character happens to be a real person (unbeknownst to the author) who begins hearing the narration of his life.
Thus we come to "Little did he know"
I find nuances fascinating! This one in particular offers so much possibility. It insinuates that the action recently taken or about to be taken will have repercussions one could not even imagine. It is quite different from "he knew little" which merely implies a lack of knowledge. Little did he know really has nothing to do with what is, or isn't, known. It is not knowledge based at all!
Little did he know is about Action. It is about Consequences, and while it holds mostly negative connotation (i.e. Little did he know opening the door would lead to his death) it is not exclusively sinister (i.e. Little did she knew getting in the car would ultimately lead to a proposal).
The beauty of the written word is our ability to take the same words and by changing their arrangement thus change, or create, a new scenario. To take a word such as know which implies knowledge or understanding (see below)
know verb \ˈnō\
: to have
(information of some kind) in your mind
: to understand
(something) : to have a clear and complete idea of (something)
: to have learned
(something, as a skill or a language)
and to transform it from knowledge based to action/consequence based. This isn't to say it loses its base in knowledge but to say that it takes on a new life, an antithesis life--he didn't know, he couldn't know--but one only existing within the context of action. So to leave you with another quote from Professor Hilbert:
"Well, it's been a very insightful ten seconds.""Know" definition comes from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. All movie quotes come from Stranger Than Fiction ©2006 Columbia Pictures
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