Please explain this sentence – the story is so captivating it seems to have taken on a life of its own – particularly, what does “taken on a life of its own mean?
My comments:
It means the story keeps growing and spreading seemingly without the author, the publisher or someone else pushing it. It’s like a plane flying on autopilot.
In short, if an idea, a theory or a rumor starts to “take on a life of its own”, it begins to grow out of control of the original author. Take rolling a snowball for example. At first, the small thing refuses to go and you have to push it from behind. Then it grows bigger and rounder and rolls more easily down a slope, gathering force and pace by itself, and before you know, it rolls galloping down the slope leaving you standing there in awe.
Robert Louis Stevenson, in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, describes how a rumor can take on a life of its own, or in this case, how asking a mere question may get out of hand:
Now Mr. Utterson asks if Mr. Enfield knows whether or not the stranger lives behind that door, and Mr. Enfield says that although the building seems a likely place for him, he noticed the man's address as being in some other square. When Mr. Utterson asks if he never asked about the place with the door, Mr. Enfield says he hasn’t, because he has a rule about never asking questions. He says that starting a question is like starting a stone rolling down a hill; the next thing you know, it’s hit some unlikely old person sitting in his back garden, and all of a sudden the family has to change its name. The stranger the circumstances, Mr. Enfield says, the less he asks.
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