Removing the Barrier

I flipped through the pamphlet, anxious for the show to begin. I skimmed through the bios and glanced at the pages when my eyes were drawn to a statement addressed in bold black letters. 
"Life is a drama without an intermission"
My eyes lingered on the phrase.
The lights started to dim, so I tossed the pamphlet beneath my seat, but the phrase impacted me more than the show.
"Life is a drama without an intermission", for some reason I thought of the nickelodeons popular during the Great Depression. How for fifty cents, you could relieve yourself from a day's worries. It was an escape, an intermission from the Depression. Then I started thinking of my own personal intermissions from life : study breaks, long walks with my iPod, writing, reading, and Facebook. I, like most people, turn to these activities for relief. We dive within these activities to forget about the troubles of life. Unfortunately, sometimes while in this state of relief, we become passive. Our skills of interpretation and observation are numbed as a method for stress relief. This numbed state can lead to a lack of understanding, especially in novels. Reading, a leisure activity, is used by many as a source of escape, but it is also used by writers as a source of communication. During this mental state of passivity, readers on not picking up the message the author is trying to convey.
Why is that though?
Because the reader has a barrier between the work and themselves. For them, it is merely a book. A source of stress relief and why would they strain themselves trying to understand the message of the author. It has nothing to do with the, why should they get involve with more troubles? Create more things to keep on the brain?
How does one defeat this discommunication?
Change the source.
For me, Persepolis was an intermission from college stress. It was homework that I actually enjoyed doing. As I read deeper and deeper into the novel, my reading skills grew more and more passive, and I ended up reading it for pleasure than trying to understand the author's message. I was able to passivly read the book, because I had a barrier between the narrator and myself. She was a child in Iran, and I was a teenager in Illinois. I couldn't relate, therefore I couldn't understand. Why should I? It was merely a book. I wanted to enjoy it anyway.
Watching the film, I saw a completely different story than the one I had read. Everything that happened in the book happened in the movie, but now it was the source of the story. Visually seeing her live her life, made her story seem more like a biography than a work of fiction. Seeing her interact with her parents, play with her friends, and go to school all in the shadow of her nation's chaos: made her story realistic- relate-able even.
We has humans build up barriers between us and troubles : it's a defensive instinct. In order for us to gain understanding, we must tear down this barrier, and allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Vulnerable enough to feel the pain the narrator is experiencing, think the confusion the narrator is thinking, and live the life the narrator is living : because only than can we understand the work.