A couple years ago, I took our car in for a service. After dropping it off at the dealer, I waited on the street corner to be picked up. The dealer is on a commercial street in NE Portland, with much traffic and little charm. A few parking lots, as the Blazers play nearby, another car dealer. The impression one gets there is of nothing, of empty spaces, which is quite uncharacteristic of most areas near downtown Portland. A dreary place.
While waiting, I read from A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan. I was reading the Out of Body chapter, narrated by Rob, a mentally unstable character. Because the book is chronologically tumbled, the reader already knows that Rob drowns, but in this chapter he’s still alive.
Rob refers to himself in the second person in this chapter. At first I neglected to ask the question any reader should ask when confronting a puzzling narrative technique: Why is the writer doing that? Each chapter of Goon Squad is written from a different viewpoint, with a different style (including an amazingly successful chapter written in PowerPoint), and I assumed that Egan was simply doing something else differently.
While standing on the corner, I was finishing the Rob chapter. At the beginning of the last paragraph, it became clear why Egan used second-person: Rob suffers from something like dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personality disorder. One part of Rob is talking to another part of Rob. I’d missed a couple clues to this earlier. But it was made obvious in the beginning of the last paragraph, and as I stood on this street corner with traffic flying past, I thought, “This is very cool. She’s using one of the tools of language (in this case, person) to amplify her revelation of the character’s character.” My favorable impression of Egan, from what I’d read in this book and from The Keep, went way up.
Then I finished that last paragraph.
In the beginning of the last sentence, Rob is still dissociated and is speaking in second person. But at the very end of the sentence he drops into first person for the only time in the chapter. He realizes he’s drowning, becomes terrified, and appears to get it together, too late. The shift to first-person hit me with the force of one of the trucks zooming past, as the character evocation and transformation became viscerally clear. Suddenly I burst out crying, standing on that shitty street corner.
Some passages in Joyce, in Woolf, in Proust, are so consummately beautiful that they make me cry, no matter how often I read them. Welcome to that club, Jennifer. Thrills like this are why I love reading great literature. It can be for a number of reasons: beautiful prose, exquisite character revelation, amazing exercise of language.
While waiting, I read from A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan. I was reading the Out of Body chapter, narrated by Rob, a mentally unstable character. Because the book is chronologically tumbled, the reader already knows that Rob drowns, but in this chapter he’s still alive.
Rob refers to himself in the second person in this chapter. At first I neglected to ask the question any reader should ask when confronting a puzzling narrative technique: Why is the writer doing that? Each chapter of Goon Squad is written from a different viewpoint, with a different style (including an amazingly successful chapter written in PowerPoint), and I assumed that Egan was simply doing something else differently.
While standing on the corner, I was finishing the Rob chapter. At the beginning of the last paragraph, it became clear why Egan used second-person: Rob suffers from something like dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personality disorder. One part of Rob is talking to another part of Rob. I’d missed a couple clues to this earlier. But it was made obvious in the beginning of the last paragraph, and as I stood on this street corner with traffic flying past, I thought, “This is very cool. She’s using one of the tools of language (in this case, person) to amplify her revelation of the character’s character.” My favorable impression of Egan, from what I’d read in this book and from The Keep, went way up.
Then I finished that last paragraph.
In the beginning of the last sentence, Rob is still dissociated and is speaking in second person. But at the very end of the sentence he drops into first person for the only time in the chapter. He realizes he’s drowning, becomes terrified, and appears to get it together, too late. The shift to first-person hit me with the force of one of the trucks zooming past, as the character evocation and transformation became viscerally clear. Suddenly I burst out crying, standing on that shitty street corner.
Some passages in Joyce, in Woolf, in Proust, are so consummately beautiful that they make me cry, no matter how often I read them. Welcome to that club, Jennifer. Thrills like this are why I love reading great literature. It can be for a number of reasons: beautiful prose, exquisite character revelation, amazing exercise of language.
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