The Stuff of Fiction by Bauer Douglas;

Author:Bauer, Douglas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

We bumped softly down a hill toward an open field that seemed to be a military graveyard, filled with rows and rows of austere, identical markers over soldiers’ graves. I’d never before come across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity.

There he stands, filled with awe and wonder, entirely sure of his surroundings and passing his impressions of them along to us in sharply lyrical detail.

Until his cohort, Georgie, cries out, “It’s the drive-in, man!”

To which he replies, after the few moments it takes him to adjust his brain, “I see. I thought it was something else.”

It is my sense that, for whatever reason, disoriented characters—drugged or drunk or under some other influence—are increasingly popular in the stories of new writers. So, returning to Vargas Llosa, it is essential to remember that confusion can certainly characterize the narrative intelligence that is telling us the story. But, lost as such narrators might be, they relay to readers what they think they are seeing and experiencing with minute conviction. Consequently, their narration should reflect that conviction—moment to moment, word for word. Absent the knowledge of what they are actually seeing, we need to see precisely what is present in their warped and woozy perception of things.

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