he always takes literature in strange mathy-logical sort of ways like this
That's because the best literature
is logical. War & Peace is not renouned for an ambiguous depiction of the napoleonic/russian struggle, Crime & Punishment isn't famous for a wishy washy interpretive view of human psychology, and Shakespeare isn't famous for using just any old word in any old place. A common thread in all great literature is careful attention to meaning, sentence structure, word choice, ect, and all the greats share in these common threads. The english language
is a lot like math, whether we realize it or not. I know I wasn't taught many things in gradeschool that I should have been, like what an antecedent is, or what the acusative case is, or what a past participle is, or what many of the other grammatical structures are. I don't mean to throw people off base, and I know I'm not the best writer in the world either, but I also know that you can't just throw a bunch of sorta-right almost-meaningful words together in a heap and expect something great to come of it.
It is an extremely short piece, and the reader wouldn't be expected to create strange extrapolations that the writer didn't mention or hint at in anyway.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. There's no reason to extrapolate that the helicopter is descending, because the context of the sentence is so limited. Say we knew that the person in the piece was outdoors, then we could infer that the helicopter is descending because we know there is nothing else overhead, no literal "ceiling" to speak of, except the sky or the helicopter, and its more likely that the helicopter would be descending than the sky. Without the information that the person in the piece is outside, however, there's nothing in the piece to link the helicopter to the ceiling. For example, the verb "collapse" is not something commonly attributed to a helicopter, but it is commonly used in conjunction with "buildings" and a ceiling is part of a building, so we could reasonably say that the building the person is in is collapsing. "swallowing the spectacle" could refer to a helicopter, true, but in the context of a collapsing ceiling I imagine the poor fellow looking at a chunk of steel about to smash him in the face. Of course, even this isn't a definite scenario, because we don't have context to draw it from. There were no explosions or cracks that we know of, and we don't even know where the fellow is. It's only
slightly more likely than the helicopter falling on him because of the word choice "collapsing ceiling."
None.