I think I really enjoy reading this book. There are a lot of little things that can mean so much; I’m constantly thinking about what the narrator is really trying to say. A few things that really interested me after class yesterday were the unnamed narrator and his race, the history of the town through the bartender, who alone is interesting, and just the way in which the narrator tries to be a slick comic. I think I’m going to start with the history of the town because I’m sure that is going to be a reoccurring discussion within the novel. Considering the name of the town is so important, particularly to “Muttonchops”, it seems increasingly relevant that he is the one to introduce the history to the narrator. On page 24 Muttonchops begins his story time by telling the narrator, “My family goes back to the firs settlers…This was a colored town once. Founded by free black men and women”.
This sparked a connection for me to the race of the unnamed character. I feel like its easy to get the idea that the narrator is a colored male by things like describing others as white men or white women. This unnamed narrator business confuses me at times. His sneaky little remarks throw me off at times. Just the fact that the bartender isn’t given a name, but rather the narrator names him himself as more of a description of what he looks like, Muttonchops. The example we discussed in class which really stuck with me is on page 50 when the narrator says,
She was clumsy. She had household accidents. Through the modern lens, he told his audience (a comedy young lady at a bar, poised sophisticates at a dinner part, a dentist), he interpreted the young lady’s constant accidents as sublimated rebellion against the strict gender roles of her time.
Upon first reading of this I caught his witty little comment towards the end, but I was mostly draw to the way he was sarcastically, in my opinion, addressing the wifes accidents. The way she’s constantly cutting herself immediately sparked two ideas in my mine. 1. She is either being aggressively treated or abused by her lovely husband who “would come back from work to confront his wife’s wounds” (50), or 2. She is slitting her wrists due most likely to some sort of depression. I’m not sure which makes more sense, but it obvious in various ways that the things in this novel are said in a way that is meant to spark these thoughts.
There is one other thing that I’m still brewing some thoughts about, but I wanted to get it out there. When the narrator introduces himself as a consultant, a nomenclature consultant, he has this interesting little paragraph of an explanation as to what his job entails. For example, there are two instances where this occurs in the firs part of the novel. The first is on page 22 when he says, “‘I name things like new detergents and medicines and stuff like that so that they sound catchy…You have some kind of pill to put people to sleep or make them less depressed so they can accept the world. Well you need a reassuring name that will make them believe in the pill’”. This happens again on page 44, except the scenario is a little different. Interestingly enough, what stays the same is the idea to name something that will “make them less depressed so they can accept the world”. I haven’t quite decided what this is all about, but it struck me as interesting.
