Drown

Drown is a very cohesive piece with a  consistent narrator voice throughout. However, at certain times, it is unclear whether Junot Diaz has Yunior narrating the story. One of the most poignant examples of this is in "Negocios." Also in "No Face" the narrator is obviously Ysrael, the kid whose face was eaten off by a pig when he was a baby. Junot Diaz's collection is most like Denis Johnson's "Jesus' Son" of the cycles we have read. They both have this dirty realism quality. While the stories are insightful and artistic, they also all show this dirtiness and grittiness of real life. Both of the cycles are about lower class individuals mixed up in alcohol and drugs and sex. However, the narrators in both cycles, Yunior and Fuckhead, respectively, are able to convey this poetic like language to the reader although we are painted a picture of their dirt, real world.  

Although the characters seem to be uneducated with nothing insightful or intelligent to say, there are moments when Yunior would surprise me. In "Edison, New Jersey" he shows a very advanced knowledge of history, "There are Incan Roads in the Andes that even today you couldn't work a knife between two of the cobblestones. The sewers that the Romans built in Bath were so good that they weren't replaced until the 1950s. That's the sort of thing I can believe in." Here he shows that he is actually very intelligent and knows quite a bit about something as abstract as artichectural methods of the ancient world. He is also able to analogize it to his present day situation at fixing pool tables. He takes something innovative, amazing and beautiful (the aqueducts of Rome and roads of the Incans) and is able to make a strong comparison with fixing tables. This is his reality, his dirty realism, that fixing tables to him is as much of an art and science as building aqueducts in ancient Rome. 

However, there is also that vulgarity throughout the cycle that keeps the reader placed in their dirty world. Right from the beginning in "Ysrael" the characters speak so frankly and vulgarly that its impossible to miss. This is how they speak, "He'd take the campo girls down to the dams and swim and if he was lucky they let him put it in their mouth or in their asses." And you have to remember this is a little child saying this. This statement is in stark contrast to the seemingly smart and proud man that knew so much about building aqueducts and prided himself on his skill of fixing pool tables.

The language of Yunior and his family and friends is what makes Drown, well, Drown. Its unique to anything else we have read. Right from the opening quote we know that language will be a major theme. The quote from Gustavo Perez Firmat tells us that although he is writing in English he has failed to tell you what he wanted to tell you because he does not belong to the English language culture. He does not belong to those traditional American values. He is an outcast in the mainstream society and through his language he makes this obvious. It sets him apart from main stream America, but it keeps him and his family together, keeping their culture and traditional language of the Dominican Republic. 

In high school I remember reading Denis Johnson's "Emergency" then reading Diaz's "Aurora" and thinking to myself that "Aurora" was just a Hispanic version of "Emergency." The styles of the two authors are very similar. But, now that I have read the stories the way they were supposed to be read, inside of their respective cycles I can see how each has its own unique language and style. For my writing cycle I would like to have a distinct language and style to it. One comprable to Johnson or Diaz. I want each story in my own cycle to feel similar to one that precedes and succeeds it. 

Jesus' Son

Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son is one of the more cohesive cycles we have read in this class in terms of narrator. While many of the cycles have had this omniscient narrator throughout, Jesus' Son's narrator not only tells us the story, but is the central protagonist. Each story is told through the eyes of "Fuckhead," a disillusioned, alcoholic, drug-addicted hospital orderly and aspiring writer. He travels throughout the midwest United States telling us his tales of meeting others like him and going through his drug and alcohol fueled adventures.

While on the surface Fuckhead appears to be a strung out loser, as I read each story I began to sympathize with the character more and more. He's very real. Although he's not relatable to me by any means, I find his actions and thought processes fascinating. He is so UNlike me that I find myself caring what happens to him and what he's doing. Deni Johnson makes him such a real, visible character that its hard not to sympathize with him. He's a human being in need of some serious assistance. Even as a reader you can't turn your back on him. 

The way in which Johnson is able to garner sympathy for Fuckhead is through the use of first-person narration. If he had written a cycle of short stories that were in the third-person then we would never have seen inside Fuckheads, well, head. He would just seem like a loser to us, someone polluting the world population that we would care lived or died. However, we are able to see what's going on in there. From the first story, we get this split persona of Fuckhead the drug-addict mess and Fuckhead the semi-caring, kind human being. In the first few pages of "Car Crash" he talks about all the bourbon he drank, hashish he smoked and amphetamines he guzzled down. We realize from the start that this man has a serious addiction problem. He remains in this inebriated state throughout the story, as well as throughout the cycle. However, once he is involved in the car crash that kills a man, Fuckhead shows his caring side. He holds on t o the baby that was in the car with him, making sure it was safe. He goes around the wreck seeing if he could help in any way. He then shows his all too human side once at the hospital. Once the woman is told that her husband has died in the car wreck, she begins hysterically crying and screaming. Fuckhead says, "It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere." While it may seem that Fuckhead himself is being entirely UNsympathetic to what is going one, he is just showing human nature. He had just been in involved in a deadly car wreck in which he survived without a scratch. Now he's sitting there listening to the torment of a woman who has just lost her husband. This makes him appreciate his life. No matter how terrible his life is going, and how terrible he knows it will be, he knows it is better than dying or have a loved one die on you. Anyone would feel like this. He's just happy to be alive. By the end of the cycle Fuckheads life is being to get back on track. He's shown us his moments of drug-addicted misadventures such as roaming around with Georgie or going bar to bar looking for a belly dancer. He's also shown as a kind side like when hes the only person who wants to bring McInnes to the hospital and cares if he lives or dies. He's a lost soul wandering the earth looking for some respect. He so desperately wants to be liked and just cannot seem to get what he wants. The drugs and alcohol are able to curb his appetite for human interaction and love, but it just never happens for him. Hes a sad character, one you have to not only sympathize with, but pity. 

Self-Help

Lorrie Moore's "Self-Help" fits the mold of a short story cycle perfectly, as one that does not require the same setting and recurring characters. As I read the stories I did find that the narrators, their mothers and significant others all blended into the same characters. After the first few two or three stories I even began to think that the narrators were all the same character, but then they were assigned different names and each had their own mother with some sort of psychological or physical ailment. From "How to be an Other Woman" to "To Fill" there is a constant voice from a female narrator. To me I felt like each of these women shared the same thoughts. One could easily have been substituted for another. While "Dubliners" relied on setting as a constant throughout the cycle and "Winesburg, Ohio" and "In Our Time" had recurring characters, "Self-Help" has none of these, except in spirit. 

That being said, I found "Self-Help" to be incredibly difficult to read. One of the major qualms I had with the way Lorrie Moore wrote is that most, if not all, the narrators were extremely either anti-male or had a very negative attitude towards men. Having to read almost 200 pages of feminist drawl was excruciatingly painful and boring. It made me want to jump into the book and argue with each narrator. While Moore can be praised with writing a cycle of short stories professing feminism and showing things from a woman's point of view, I felt that she may have done the opposite. All these women seem the same. Is that the message she wanted to send? That all women, when they are in similar circumstances, will act and think the same? She's grouping women together, not individualizing them. Can you really tell the difference between the mistress in the beige raincoat from "How to be an Other Woman" and the woman who cheats on her boyfriend from "How?" They act like the same person and blame the men in their lives for their problems. 

Both of these stories paint men in a negative light, albeit in different ways. The man in "an Other Woman" sleeps around, admitting that while he is not married, has several girlfriends at once while sleeping with the narrator. He obviously seen as a scumbag. The boyfriend in "How" is a very loving, friendly guy who treats his girlfriend well and wants to start a family with her. He loves her very much, yet the narrator pushes him away, cheats on him and tells him that she no longer loves him. HE was suffocating HER. Here you have a woman who hates the man she's with because he's sleeping around and in the next story you have a woman who hates the man she's with because he's too loving and too faithful. This makes no sense at all. This just draws women in a more negative light because Moore writes them as irrational. In fact, in almost every story the, for lack of a better word, antagonist, is a male. In "What Is Seized" there is the cold father.  In "A Kids Guide to Divorce" the father and ex-husbands side of the story is never shown. In "Go Like This" the loving husband Elliot is pushed aside and thought of as an "asshole" whenever he tries to help his dying wife. "In How to Talk to Your Mother" the father is extremely distant. In "Amahl" Moss the boyfriend gets very angry as the narrator tries to get closer to him. There really aren't any male characters painted in a positive light.

Another major theme is disease. In several stories the mothers of the narrators are sick and dying and in "Go Like This" the narrator has decided to end her own life while suffering from cancer. Most of the mothers in these stories are weak and pathetic, even before their illnesses begin to dominate their lives. Many of the mothers have been cheated on and are without a husband at the time of their deaths. This is a subtle way of creating a situation where Moore shows men abandoning their wives and the young, strong-willed daughter must come to the rescue and care for the mother. This happens several times which gets redundant and frustrating to read. Moore may have just titled this book "Pathetic Women who Hate Men" because this is the type of woman she writes about. 

In Our Time

The character's and dialogue portrayed in Ernest Hemingway's "In Our Time" are a perfect example of saying a lot by just saying a little. Hemingway is famous for this concise, to the point writing that leaves  certain stories ambiguous and for the reader to decipher the meaning. Basically every single vignette fell into this style along with, most poignantly, "A Very Short Story" and "The Revolutionist." What these two stories, and more of the vignettes have in common, are that the narrator and/or main protagonist is unnamed and once again ambiguous which is sort of a running theme throughout this cycle. 

It would seem that the unnamed protagonist in "A Very Short Story" is Nick Adams, the main character in many of the other stories as he is a soldier returning from war back to Chicago where Nick is from. Then again, this character could be any number of soldiers who returned home from World War I to Chicago. Obviously Nick Adams was not the only young man from the Chicago area to fight in the war. The narrator of "The Revolutionist" is even more difficult to decipher. While there story (All one and a half pages of it) are written in first-person there is absolutely no internal monologue. The narrator is just observing what is going on, not stating his opinion or thoughts or emotions. The narrator is a character in the story, not some omnipresent force telling the events from on high. He's there in the action of what is going on, yet Hemingway has him merely reporting the events of this other man, this revolutionist. The unnamed narrator could again be Nick Adams, but in perfect Hemingway form it is impossible to know for sure. 

What Hemingway has done in many of these stories is created what one could call clones of Nick Adams and placed them in stories and situations that the "real" Adams would have gotten into as well. In most of the stories or vignettes where the narrator or main character is unnamed (save for the ones about the matadors) one could easily replace the "He" or "His" or "Him" with "Nick Adams" and the stories would not be any different. There is one story however that even though the main character is named with his own identity, he could easily b replaced with Nick Adams.

In "A Soldier's Home" Krebs is a young man who has returned from Europe following World War I. Krebs has seen terrible things and is noticeably shaken and still dealing with this past trauma. His anger is only more so fueled by this bitterness that rises in him when he does not receive any sort of hero's welcome when he returns home. It is explained that Krebs did not come immediately home following the war and people even "seemed to think it was rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back so late, years after the war was over." 

Krebs is an angry young man who has lied about war stories in order to talk to people. Even when he tried to make his war stories more exciting he received a negative reaction from people which just fueled his bitterness. He seems almost dead on the inside even telling his mother, "I don't love anybody," including her which prompts her to burst into tears. What is so striking about this story is that we never learn what exactly it was that Krebs saw in the war. It was obviously some sort of atrocity or traumatic event, but Hemingway never reveals any particulars. The fact is, we don't really even need to know what happened to Krebs. Hemingway is allowing us as the reader to create a war scenario in our head as to what happened to Krebs that made him so desensitized to the world. An interesting note is that Krebs could easily be Nick Adams. Along with the main character in the vignette that precedes this story. Either Krebs or Nick could be the solider who is trapped in a trench and in desperation calls out to God and promises to spread his world if he lives, yet when he does, never says a word about God to anybody. This could be the traumatic event that shaped Krebs life. This could be a traumatic event in Nick Adams live. This could also be a traumatic event in one of the millions of soldiers who fought in World War I. It doesn't matter who it is. This is the point I believe Hemingway is trying to make. All the soldiers, no matter where they are from, what their names or what they were like before the war, can sort of melt into the same figure following the war. People from different backgrounds are thrown into this horrific setting of death and destruction and come out as these stoic individuals shaped solely by the atrocities of war. All the soldiers are the same. The unnamed narrators, unnamed characters, Nick Adams or Krebs can all be the same person. The war makes people feel like that. It stripped people of their identity before the war. 

Winesburg, Ohio

"Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson is like Joyce's "Dubliners" in many ways, but is also very different. While it does take place in the same town throughout the cycle as "Dubliners" does and has similar themes throughout, it has one identifying aspect that "Dubliners" does not have. In "Winesburg, Ohio" one of the unifying themes (besides small town life) is the character of George Willard. When we first meet him he seems like a nice enough fellow. He is talking to the town outcast Wing Biddlebaum about the man's sad story of how he was run out of his old town. George Willard is willing to listen to him, which is what he does for most of the book. 

People seem attracted to George Willard and eager to tell him their personal life stories. As a reporter for the Winesburg Eagle it is George's job to not only report the news of the town, but to record its history. These people tell George their personal stories that you do not think would be in a newspaper. For instance, Wash Williams tells George about how his wife was cheating on him and how he know despises women. This I would hope wouldn't make it into the Winesburg Eagle, but still these people will tell George anything. It would seem that they don't want their stories in the newspaper, but they want someone to be the keeper of their tales. They want their stories to live on through George Willard who they believe will live on beyond them and will move to bigger and better things elsewhere outside Winesburg.

All these people; Kate Swift, Was Williams, Wing Biddlebaum, Doctor Parcival, Mrs. Willard, Louise Trunnion view George Willard as this almost Godlike figure. I think Anderson did this on purpose. Willard, the young handsome writer ambitious writer, is obviously based on himself. He obviously wants this projection in the story to be someone better than all the other folk in Winesburg. Only one person sees George Willard for what he truly is. That person happens to be his so-called best friend, Seth Richmond. Seth doesn't think of George as this person so much better than everyone else. In fact, at times it seems he hates him. In "The Thinker" we are able to actually see the real George Willard through the eyes of Seth Richmond. He is a petty, materialistic guy. He knows his friend loves Helen White, but tells Seth to go and tell Helen that he is in love with her and to basically set it up for him. He tells Seth that he wants to know what its like to be in love for a book he's writing and figures Helen White is the person he could be in love with. That is such a slap in the face to Seth. He actually loves this girl while George just wants to use her so he can see what's it like to be in love for a book. He could have picked anyone, but he picks his best friend's love interest. 

Although there is technically only one story that "concerns George Willard" almost all of them contain his presence either in a large role or just in passing. At times I was angered by the ways Anderson used him in this way. Why not just write a novel about George Willard? It seems Anderson wanted to do that, but at the last moment just sort of wussied out and wrote a collection of short stories instead, but kept the George Willard references in. He could have done so many things with George Willard, but he just irregularly showed up. George could have been the raconteur of the town and had a set purpose like showing up to provide commentary of what is going on or symbolizing something. There was so much promise in his function, but I think by overutilizing George Willard, Sherwood Anderson underutilized his potential.

Beside George Willard, there was one minor theme that I found cropped up here and there throughout a lot of the stories that I don't think we ever covered in class. I found in several stories this theme of parents not just being afraid of their children, but in a way idolizing them. Seth Richmond's mother is said to have an "almost unhealthy respect for the youth" which kept her "for the most part silent in his presence." Even when he has done something wrong she "found herself unable to reprove him." She is scared of her own son. This is also the case with George Willard and his mother. She is obsessed with him. She will sneak into his room when he is gone and look through his things and pray to God that he becomes successful, but not too successful and even plans on killing her husband when he scolds George. Its a very unhealthy relationship not unlike Seth and Mrs. Richmond. The same goes for Belle Carpentar whose father "was afraid of his daughter." Even Tom Hard is pushed around by his very young daughter who forces him to start calling her Tandy after an old drunk told her that should be her name. These parents in Winesburg are just paralyzed with fear by their children and will do anything to keep them happy and in their good graces. Its sort of pathetic the way some of these parents act, letting their children boss them around. But, I guess thats just how they do it in Winesburg, Ohio. 

Dubliners

After completing all 15 short stories of James Joyce's "Dubliners" I feel like I have a personal connection with the people of this city and even the city itself. For the most part, the subjects of Joyce's stories are the lower class of the city that one would probably not meet or see if they were to be visiting. He writes of the people who call Dublin home, both reluctantly or happily. These people are all very different, yet are connected together with this common thread of their place in society and (for many characters) a longing to leave Dublin all together. 

From reading this collection you get the a strong feeling of bitterness towards Dublin from Joyce. Most of the characters can only be categorized as low-lives such as Lenehan and Corley from "Two Gallants" or pathetic such as Mr. Kernan in "Grace" and Mrs. Sinico in "A Painful Case." Alcoholism is a major theme throughout the stories and many places in Dublin are constantly painted as dirty, old, dilapidated or (my personal favorite) musty. Dublin seems to give off more of a vibe of a small town where everyone knows each others business rather than the large city that it is. In all the stories it seems that everyone knows everyone and not many strangers are encountered. If someone does come upon a stranger it is a major point in the story as in "An Encounter." 

There are two stories that exemplify this longing to leave the city, however they are represented entirely differently. In "A Little Cloud" the main character, Little Chandler, goes to meet an old friend named Gallaher who he has not seen in many years. Gallaher has apparently done very well for himself since he last saw Chandler and he is obviously jealous of his old friend's good fortune as the story progresses. Gallaher is a perfect example of what many of the characters in "Dubliners" strive to become. He is wealthy since having left Dublin and has no regrets about leaving. In fact, in his conversation with Chandler he is somewhat condescending towards the city calling it "dear dirty Dublin" in a very tongue in cheek manner. 

As their conversation progresses and the two share quite a few drinks Chandler, all subtlety aside, "looked at his friend enviously." The two talk of Chandler's family and Gallaher continually states how he would never get married and if somehow he did, he would only marry for money. Chandler, who is married with a baby son really does not say much in defense of marriage. The two end their conversation with Gallaher talking about the unfortunate possibility of being with one woman the rest of your life. His final comment on the matter is, "Must get a bit stale, I should think."  Chandler goes home presumably contemplating his life with his wife and his entire life in Dublin. He goes to hold his son who is crying and his wife starts yelling at him blaming him for the baby's crying. The story ends with Chandler's eyes filling with "tears of remorse." This can be remorse for causing the baby to cry or remorse for not getting out of Dublin and making something of himself as Gallaher did. 

The next story that shows this longing to leave to Dublin is in "Eveline." However the longing to leave Dublin is made more complicated as it shows Dublin to be this place that is so hard to leave, yet so hard to stay. The girl's life in Dublin was not going well at all. Most of her family has died and her father is a drunk whom she fears will beat her. She is able to leave to go to Buenos Ayres with a sailor named Frank yet at the last moment on the docks she decides not to go and as Frank calls after her to come on the boat she just stares at him as, "Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition." 

This "paralysis" that happens to Eveline is another common theme in throughout "Dubliners." The word appears on the first page of "The Sisters" as the feeling the young narrator has at the reaction to the death of Father Flynn. Paralysis may even be used to describe what happens to the young main character in "Araby." The narrator is another character who longs for something outside of Dublin. He decides to go the exotic, Eastern bazaar known as Araby because he promised a girl he is infatuated with that he will buy her something. He arrives at the bazaar with little money in his pocket at a time when most of the shops are closing. He realizes he doesn't have enough money to buy anything and becomes angry with himself that he let greed and sexual urges towards his crush to consume his actions on the day. He is in a state of paralysis as he gazes "up into the darkness" of the bazaar. However, before this paralysis he is just another Dubliner longing for something different outside the realm of Dublin.