Week 7 Blog

Emergency, written by Denis Johnson, was an interesting short story that kept me entertained. At first I thought it was going to be a story about what happened to Terrence Weber with the knife in  his eye, but instead it was a journey with narrator and Georgie.

I first thought that Georgie was insane, when he kept talking about the blood, and the way the narrator spoke about his mannerisms. Then, I realized that both the narrator and Georgie were doing drugs that Georgie stole from the hospital. Georgie and the narrator then proceed to take a drive and then get lost. While reading, the story line seemed to be choppy and confusing. I realized that the story was written this way for that very reason. It paralleled Georgie and the narrator's thoughts and actions due to the drugs.

As they proceed to get lost on the road, they run over a rabbit, and Georgie attempts to save the babies. Unfortunately, due to the drugs, the narrator forgets about the rabbits and squishes them. Then, they pick up a hitch hiker ( AWOL from the military) and promise to take him to Canada.

The story through my eyes was random, yet it kept my attention. The confusion of the narrator and Georgie was evident through the structure of the sentences as well as the skips within the plot. Each event doesn't necessarily relate to the next.

On page 283, the narrator says, "Or maybe that wasn't the time it snowed. Maybe it was the time we slept in the truck and I rolled over on the bunnies and flattened them. It doesn't matter. What's important for me to remember now is that early the next morning the snow was melted off the windshield and the daylight woke me up." This simple passage I feel really shows the tone of the story and allows the reader to understand the state that the narrator is in. It seems that he is struggling to remember the details of the story in order to tell them to the audience.

I surprisingly enjoyed reading this short story and I even found it a little comical due to the state of confusion.

This story didn't have very many difficult words or vocabulary but I did look up exactly what AWOL meant: absent without official leave. This description of the hitch hiker doesn't really seem to relate to the rest, but I suppose this goes along with central theme.