ALL THE THINGS YOU MISS IN THE MIRROR:
AN ANALYSIS OF PERCEPTION AND PERSPECTIVE IN MODERN LITERATURE
A Report of a Senior Study
by
Justin Theodore Kirkland
Major: English and Writing/Communications
Maryville College
Fall, 2011
Date Approved _____________________, by_____________________________________
Faculty Supervisor
ABSTRACT
In preparation for the composition of a creative thesis consisting of six chapters of
a novel, this research compares the portrayal of homicide in literature to the portrayal of
homicide in journalism. A selection of four diverse journalistic cases of interest, as well
as an equal number of literary works of similar detail were chosen and compared for
characterization, storylines, and public opinion. Conclusions state that literature provides
a more rounded scope concerning the details of a homicide than journalism has the ability
to provide. The second chapter discusses the craft of the creative portion, including both
first person narrative and stream of consciousness. A selection of five novels were
chosen, three for first person narrative and two for stream of consciousness, to discuss the
effectiveness of these narrative devices. The six creative chapters revolve around Jeremy,
a college-aged student who witnesses his father commit a murder. The story begins as the
narrator, Jeremy, is sitting in the courthouse recollecting all of the events that led him to
testify. The narrator shifts from first person narrative to stream of consciousness as he
approaches the stand to testify.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter
I
Comparison of Murder in Literature and Journalism
The Lovely Bones and Jon Benet Ramsey
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and Leslie Irvin
In Cold Blood and Holcomb, KS Murders
Rage and the Columbine Massacre
Conclusion
1
5
10
16
23
30
II
The First Person Narrative and Stream of Consciousness
The First Person Narrative
Stream of Consciousness
Conclusion
33
38
52
58
III
Creative Chapter: For Men Like Us
Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Afterward
61
65
68
81
94
102
114
Works Cited
119
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For Pop,
who always taught me that love is stronger than
hate and that no one ever has to stop
growing into a better person.
For Summar,
who believed in my stories, characters, and me, even
during the weeks that I had trouble
believing in them myself.
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CHAPTER I
A COMPARISON OF MURDER IN LITERATURE AND JOURNALISM
Introduction
Mark Twain once said, “Write what you know.” That maxim has never been a
mystery; people have been writing for centuries on end. Knowledge stems from
experience: a moment in time that someone lived a scenario, read about it from the mass
of words in a textbook, or watched it unfold before their eyes. To correct Mark Twain, a
more accurate statement would be, “Write what you feel.” The source of most writers’
inspiration does not come from a direct event but rather the emotion that stems from the
situation. The plotlines of daily events make their way from televisions and newspapers,
into the human mind, releasing hormones throughout the brain to create an emotional
response. That response inspires words to formulate, travel into our fingertips, and
eventually find their way to the page. Every once in a while, those words find their way
to the front pages of newspapers, set into books to exist forever. Those words are bound
together, adorned with dedications and addendums to signify the timeline of human
interest they have garnered. Other words never find their way out of the emotion that
inspires their creation.
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The question, however, is, “why?” What is it about a particular news story that
takes precedent over another one? What are the details that lead a story to infamy, and
what is it about the human experience that leads writers to recreate life’s narratives in
fictitious format? One answer may be that humanity is mystified by the unthinkable. In
the context of murder, humanity is bound together by a single thread: fear. The Oxford
English Dictionary lists two main entries for the word “fear;” the first states, “A sudden
and terrible event; peril.” The second definition is listed as, “The emotion of pain or
uneasiness caused by the sense of impending danger, or by the prospect of some possible
evil.” Fear is the emotional response that human nature gravitates toward when all
immediate options have been instantaneously exhausted. Fear acts as a catalyst for
liveliness, and what occurrence inspires a desire for livelihood more than the impending
fear of murder?
Americans have dealt with the prevalence of murder since the nation’s founding.
However gruesome and carnal they may be though, history proves that Americans flock
to the most miniscule of details concerning a murder. As elementary school children,
Americans are taught to identify the name of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President
Abraham Lincoln. Bonnie and Clyde become villains children come to rebelliously love,
regardless of the string of people killed in their wake. The fascination continues on
throughout recent history. “In the year following the massacre at Columbine High
School, the nation’s fifty largest newspapers printed nearly 10,000 stories related to the
events and its aftermath, averaging about one story per newspaper every other day”
(Newman et al, 49). Though journalism is the most obvious outlet for reporting and
portrayal of murder, it is not the earliest by any means.
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Novelists, poets, and playwrights have been probing into the psyches of
murderers for centuries, publishing infamous lines such as “Et tu Brute?” while painting
unforgettable images within the minds of their readers and viewers alike. As mentioned
previously, the human mind translates most murder situations as ones that invoke fear.
However, at the discretion of an author, the emotional spectrum is limitless. The
similarities between journalism and literature seem to be few and far between, but two of
the driving factors that exist in both mediums are the desire for feeding human interest
and the development of knowledge through written word, emotion, and perception.
Murder is a topic that is universal to all populations, but with twentieth century
America’s explosion in journalism, the topic of murder was able to take a whole new
stage in American popular culture. With such a surge of outlets portraying this subject
matter, authors became overwhelmed with information, giving birth to new angles on
what seemed to be an exhausted subject. The true crime genre was created with the
publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, followed by a plethora of writers aspiring
to the dedicated research and perspective presented in his book.
One of the greatest differences, however, between these authors and the
journalism streamed into American homes is that the latter leaves most of the
perpetrator’s story at the crime scene. In literature, readers are pulled into the killer’s
home, free to search inside of his mind for some kind of clue as to what pushes him to
commit such a heinous act. Third party onlookers suddenly can take the role of the
psychologist, the detective, and sometimes even the sympathizer. Depending on the yarn
being unraveled, a reader can uncomfortably begin to understand the methods that led
one human to kill another. There are opportunities for a reader to befriend a victim, to
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immerse himself so deeply within the framework of the story that it is as if you can hear
the sound of the gun’s hammer being cocked. Much like literature, perception is the key
ingredient in journalism and news media. Mary Winkler, a native of East Tennessee, and
Amy Fisher, better known as “Long Island Lolita,” are both infamously known for
shooting another human. Mary Winkler killed her preacher husband with a shotgun then
fled the state with her three children. She was presented as a quiet housewife merely
fighting the helpless struggle of silenced domestic violence. Amy Fisher shot her lover’s
wife, severely wounding her. Both women committed similar felonies, but one was
painted as a helpless housewife, the other, a menacing mistress.
Journalism and literature seem to only have one thing in common in terms of
written comparability: the fact that both are written. However, when comparing subject
matter, the exigency for writing isn’t dissimilar at all. People thrive on the topics covered
in both literature and journalism with a morbid fascination of murder and other
unthinkable human acts. Both mediums take the stories of victims and murderers and
bring them to life, welcome them into the homes of their public, and divulge the details
that would otherwise be unknown. Their methods in doing so, however, divert from any
standardized avenue. By discussing four pairings of journalistic reporting to four similar
literary counterparts, the likenesses and variations of murder in two written mediums will
provide new insight into the American depiction of murder. The topic of murder has
many faces; the dependant variable lies in the portrayal of murder that a news station,
publication, or author chooses to take.
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The Lovely Bones and Jon Benet Ramsey
The first pairing of journalistic reporting and literature focuses less on the
murderer and more on the victim. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is the story of Susie
Salmon, a fourteen year old who was raped and brutally murdered. The story is told from
Susie’s perspective from an afterlife that follows her family’s struggle to cope with her
death and the fact that her killer has not been and ultimately will not be identified. In
comparison, the JonBenet Ramsey murder of 1996 became one of the most publicized
murder cases of the late twentieth century. The identity of the perpetrator is still
unknown, but reports on the murder in tabloids and some magazines are not an
uncommon occurrence almost fifteen years later. Wall Street Journal writer, Richard
North Patterson, states,
What makes the Ramsey case a unique, unsettling variation on a theme is,
of course, JonBenet herself… Our pervasive suspicion of the Ramseys
derives from much more than the absence of outside suspects, or the
particulars of the crime scene… We look at the videos of JonBenet, and
want to know what happened next. We don't. It is that, the tantalizing,
dispiriting absence of an ending, that will help us remember her next year,
and the year after that. (Patterson)
The allure of the Ramsey case ultimately stems from the inquisitions of consumed
housewives and disturbed parents: what kind of person would kill a little girl, and why
has the identity of her killer remained unrevealed? Those same sentiments can also be
found in The Lovely Bones. One of the biggest differences between the Ramsey murder
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and The Lovely Bones, however, is the perspective from which the stories are being
delivered. The journalistic approach to the JonBenet case has taken a sensationalist
method of asking “who did it” repeatedly to keep readers’ and viewers’ attention,
occasionally reporting on a new finding or source to help freshen up reporting that has
started to become stale. In doing so, the audience becomes less concerned about the well
being of the victim and more concerned about their own curiosities. JonBenet Ramsey’s
story is left in the hands of family statements and headlines reserved for three or four
pages into the newspaper.
In the case of Susie Salmon and The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold enables the
victim to speak for herself. The reader is offered an unearthly opportunity to receive all
the answers to questions that would not be answerable in the realm of journalistic media.
Critic Kenneth Womack writes, “The Lovely Bones deftly taps into our yearnings to
eclipse the laws of space and time. Even more powerfully, the novel depicts the many
ways in which interpersonal tragedy possesses the capacity for tearing survivors' lives
apart at the very moment in which they need familial companionship the most”
(Womack). In doing this, the novel is able to encapsulate a more fulfilling account of the
murder being presented while also creating a stronger emotional response; the audience
no longer has to be concerned with the basic questions surrounding the perpetrator’s
identity or his methods for murder but rather the more cathartic questions that force them
into the uncomfortable state of questioning the motives and ability of one human to carry
out the act of killing another.
Drawing similarities between the two cases at hand is not impossible. There are
definitive moments in both murders that the families must come to deal with the idea that
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their daughters have been murdered. In The Lovely Bones, news of the murder’s finality
comes much later in the book. Susie’s body was never found, but because of the excess of
blood at the crime scene, it is suggested to the family that she has died. Kenneth Womack
writes, “Unable to make sense of Susie's sudden disappearance from their lives, the
Salmons initially cleave to each other, hoping against hope that somehow she will return
to their midst. … given that so much blood had been found at the scene of the crime, they
begin the difficult work of having to confront her fate, as well as their own” (Womack).
The novel sets up its reader to be startled at the shock of the first line, “My name was
Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on
December 6, 1973” (Sebold 1). In spite of this, there is a secondary wave of emotion that
the reader must deal with when the family has to cope with the murder of their daughter.
The complex presentation of the murder lends to the emotionally unsettling nature of the
book.
Unlike The Lovely Bones, the JonBenet Ramsey murder was unveiled just hours
after the discovery of the ransom note that detailed her “kidnapping.” The body of the
six-year-old was found in the house and news articles starting surfacing as if they were
press releases from the family. The Ramseys held a prominent social standing in
Colorado, so reports of her father’s leave of absence from his company surfaced less than
a week from the murder. The murder instantly became less of a case and more of a soap
opera in print. Less than three weeks after the murder, Time Magazine stated,
Nearly three weeks into the investigation of the murder of sixyear-old JonBenet, the Little Miss Colorado whose battered body was
found in the basement … the mystery of her death has only become more
7
confusing. Boulder police have not named a suspect, while JonBenet's
parents, John and Patricia, are now communicating with investigators only
through their lawyers and a media consultant. (Gleick)
It was painfully obvious less than a month in that the details of her death were more
suitable for a television miniseries than a reputable news station.
The criminal case had turned into a portrayal of an American tragedy. Focus had
curved away from the murder and toward the drama that unfolded in the lives of the
Ramsey family. More than a year and a half later, Richard Woodbury, also of Time
Magazine, reported, “But in the days following the murder, there was a bitter falling-out
between the two men [Mr. Ramsey and his neighbor, Mr. White], with sharp words
exchanged at the time of JonBenet's funeral. White was reportedly enraged that the
Ramseys didn't seem to be fully cooperating with police” (Woodbury). The longer that
the reporting of the case continued, the less the reporting seemed to center on relevant
details to the murder. All of a sudden, the articles were focusing on the dramatics of the
Ramsey family affairs, the potential motives of farfetched subjects, and the likelihood
that her nine-year-old brother could have committed the murder himself. The relevance
of the murder starting meaning less and less, and without Susie Salmon’s ability to
communicate with what ultimately became her audience, JonBenet and her murder
started taking backseat to the absurdities of the “what may have happened.” The
sensationalized portrayal of her murder starting taking on a face of its own, which
ultimately became less about the victim and more about the dysfunctional state of the
situation as a whole. Suddenly the family, the unnamed murderer, and the media
coverage meant more than JonBenet Ramsey.
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One of the most distinctive differences between JonBenet’s murder and the
murder of Susie Salmon in The Lovely Bones is the ultimate portrayal of the aftermath.
Even today as shoppers line buggies up in aisles next to the Reeses and Kit Kats, there’s
still the occasional face of JonBenet on tabloids and the occasional popularized
magazine. She lives in a place of infamy that will never truly let her die. Because of the
influence of journalism and reporting to fulfill the curiosity of people, JonBenet will live
on as long as her audience wishes her to live. The journalist is ultimately at the disposal
of the reader, and reporting on something that has already been reported on still means a
paycheck as long as readers aren’t tired of revisiting the same information. However, in
the case of The Lovely Bones and all literature for that matter, the reader is ultimately at
the mercy of the author. Claire Messud of Newsweek writes, “if you were to remove
from the shelves all the novels in which a life is lost, the stacks would be bare--and
sometimes, as in ‘The Lovely Bones,’ they speak to us from beyond the grave. But
the characters of today don't spend much time on the brutal labor of dying” (Messud).
Though many of the pieces of literature being discussed do not particularly fit the
stereotype of exemption from in-text-death, each still proves the fact that the author has
the authority to give the reader only as much as he or she wants to reveal.
There is a power in literature to lay the characters to rest, dead or alive, and let the
readers have an opportunity to heal themselves from the turmoil that they have
experienced in the course of two to three hundred pages. This idea introduces an
interesting comparison between journalism and literature; an audience is greedy for
information, and their curiosity will always give way to a desire for more information,
even if it is a cyclical, repeating stream of information such as that in the JonBenet
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Ramsey case. However, within the realm of literature, that need is justly stifled. The
author has the ability to act as a roadblock for that inherent human curiosity, which
provides the reader an opportunity to take whatever information has been ingested and
deal with it as they will. Like any loss, a victim will be mourned in many different ways:
a reader can throw a book across the room, cry for hours, talk to others about it, or simply
place it deeply within his or her subconscious. Regardless of the avenue taken, literature
provides a concrete ending to a character’s life that journalism cannot provide. People
cannot be trusted to write their own endings. That’s why we naturally die. We don’t have
the understanding to appreciate the appropriate time to say “when.” Our fates are
ultimately decided for us, be it supernatural or not, because much like sensationalism in
journalism, if we had the ability we would probably try to live forever.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Leslie Irvin
Like most murder cases, the serial killings by Leslie Irvin in the 1950s presented
less of a focus on the victims at hand and centered on the unthinkable acts committed by
the murderer. The greater part of the nation was mesmerized at the notion of Leslie
Irvin’s killings, but the original propellant for his case was the idea that there were no
motives for the murders. The newspaper industry capitalized on this, with publications
such as Great Bend Daily Tribune posting dramatic headlines such as “Killer Calmly
Admits Cold Blooded Murders” (Associated Press). If the shock value of the murder was
not moving enough papers alone, the terror fueled headlines were creating enough
intrigue to pay a dime to purchase the paper for an in-home read. No stranger to shock
value herself, Flannery O’Connor brings forth a chilling glimpse into serial killing in “A
Good Man is Hard to Find.” The killer, referred to as The Misfit, is presented in a similar
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light to Leslie Irvin. Their stories are set barely one year apart with eerily similar details.
Acting as both the protagonist and antagonist in the story, Bailey’s unnamed mother takes
precedence, relaying the information about The Misfit she has recently learned about in
the local newspaper. O’Connor encompasses the heart of American sensationalism in the
following lines,
She stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the
newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit
is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read
here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take
my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I
couldn't answer to my conscience if I did. (O’Connor)
Bailey’s mother’s response was not an uncommon one for her time. Americans thrived on
the sensationalism fed to them by print journalism. The stories acted as a miniseries of
sorts for worrisome old women, like the one depicted in Flannery O’Connor’s story, to
fixate on. In reference to this specific era in newspaper reporting, the inverted pyramid
journalistic approach of placing the most pertinent details at the top of the article was
ignored. The articles were written more like chapter openers, setting up a level of
suspense to grab the attention of its reader and coax him or her to continue reading. An
article entitled “Killer Spotted in Seven Cities” in The Corpus Christi Times opens,
Trails led in many directions today as the FBI and police of five states
sought to trace Leslie Irvin, Indiana’s cleverest escapist since desperado,
John Dillinger… A St. Louis waitress, Mrs. Ruth Patton…told police she
saw the fugitive Thursday afternoon. Mrs. Patton said she was so
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frightened she locked herself in a room and remained there all night.
(“Killer Spotted” 1).
The articles surrounding the Leslie Irvin case begin to resemble less of a news report and
more of a gossip column. The emphasis on eye witness accounts and supposed “run-ins”
with Leslie Irvin contributed to the reason that newspapers in the Midwest were so
quickly moving off the stands and into the hands of their readers.
One of the most compelling points from both of these approaches to serial killers
is the portrayal of the murderer’s demeanor. In the previously mentioned article, “Killer
Calmly Admits Cold Blooded Murders,” The Great Bend Daily Tribune presents the
murder as stoically as possible. The publication states, “State Police Detective Charles
Young said Leslie Irvin, a 30-year-old paroled burglar, showed little emotion as he told
of the crime” (“Killer Spotted” 1). There is a continued emphasis throughout the article
that Leslie Irvin showed no remorse, and the article truly begins to paint a picture of Irvin
as a publically known psychopath. However, in the presentation of O’Connor’s “The
Misfit,” his stoic nature eventually leads to one portrayal that mimics that of Jesus Christ.
In an article entitled “The Moral Structure of Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard
to Find,” William Bonney writes,
Although he is a murderer, the Misfit is the only character in “A Good
Man Is Hard to Find” with any sense of what it means to ask morally
serious questions about human experience, and this quality makes him
remotely connotative of the eternal misfit, Christ, as the ambiguously
punctuated text cautiously indicates when the grandmother unwittingly
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calls her killer ‘Jesus’ just before her death, saying ‘Jesus, you ought not
shoot a lady.’ (Bonney)
The disposition of both Leslie Irvin and The Misfit are depicted as stoic in nature, but
when placed under the public eye, Leslie Irvin was presented as an unforgiving monster
that lacked the ability or compassion to generate emotion. The Misfit, on the other hand,
placed as a foil against the pleas and declarations of an entitled Christian woman, comes
across as an insightful and philosophical man who has simply gone awry. The differences
in the men’s actions are nonexistent. Both men, Leslie Irvin and The Misfit, were both
known for killing people for undisclosed reasons. However, through sensationalized
journalism, Leslie Irvin was portrayed as a killing tyrant, while The Misfit, due to literary
technique and character comparison, merely functions as the mirror that reveals the
pitfalls of the main character. This characterized contrast of two very similar cases further
supports the claim that the perception of the character or person at hand is contingent
upon the details and situation that he or she is presented in.
The main reason that Flannery O’Connor has the ability to mold her character to
be less gruesome in nature than Leslie Irvin is because she is solely in control of how that
character is presented. One of the most pivotal questions that separates one murder case
from another is the presence of morals, or lack thereof. In discussing “A Good Man is
Hard to Find,” scholar John Desmond writes, “It is also true to say, excepting Satan, no
one should be called total evil, certainly not in any absolutely sense. Good and evil, as
potentialities and as actualities, are inextricably inter-twined in human beings, and this is
true for the Grandmother and the Misfit” (Desmond, 129). This observation makes a
strong case for the argument of perception as a driving force for characterization.
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Because O’Connor was able to place the Grandmother in such a comparable and
contrasting light to the Misfit, it gives the reader the ability to draw similarities between a
murder and self-entitlement. All of a sudden, the sins under review don’t seem to be so
different in context and because of that ambiguity, the edge of murder has been softened
and the reader is left without any clear direction of how to view the murderer.
In the context of Leslie Irvin’s case, readers of his story are subject to a restriction
of a collection of facts embellished so to sell papers. A journalistic article exists to
primarily report on the news; in the days of heightened sensationalism, however,
comparisons (such as the one to John Dillinger, made above) and spin gave way to a
much more negative image being presented. The writing in these newspapers is not
geared for justice for the characters, but rather justice to the plotline. If the plot does not
remain interesting enough, why would a newspaper reader not turn to a novel? There has
to be a dark twist to the plot that allows the reader to find something within journalistic
print that cannot be found anywhere else.
However, the dramatized nature of Leslie Irvin’s killing spree set a new standard
for sensationalism in journalism. There was no argument that Leslie Irvin had killed six
people in the Indiana area; actually, Leslie Irvin was the first to admit that he had done
so, but the question was less pertinent as to the heinousness of the crime or the guilt that
should be had from it but rather the fairness of a trial stacked with a jury enveloped in the
journalism following the case. The official Supreme Court ruling of Irvin v Dowd,
Warren, which details the accusations of an unfair trial states,
Here the build-up of prejudice is clear and convincing. An examination of
the then current community pattern of thought as indicated by the popular
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news media is singularly revealing. For example, petitioner's first motion
for a change of venue from Gibson County alleged that the awaited trial of
petitioner had become the cause celebre of this small community— so
much so that curbstone opinions, not only as to petitioner's guilt but even
as to what punishment he should receive, were solicited and recorded on
the public streets by a roving reporter, and later were broadcast over the
local stations.
For the first noted time in history, the mass growth of communication and the due process
of justice began to cross paths, and the true power of journalistic reporting was beginning
to be recognized on a national level in America. Though not captured, The Misfit of
O’Connor’s story bore the same prejudice as his alleged murders in Florida were being
reported on in Georgia. The fact had become obvious that sensationalism was growing to
an increasingly high level and murder was the fastest way to gain national attention. Irvin
v Dowd set a precedent, however, that not only protected the Sixth Amendment rights of
Americans but truly changed the face of American journalism. Author, Andrew Stoner,
quotes the Supreme Court judge in Leslie Irvin’s case within the book Notorious 92
stating, “With his life at stake, it is not too much that [Irvin] be tried in an atmosphere
undisturbed by so huge a wave of public passion and by a jury in which two-thirds of the
members admit, before hearing any testimony, to professing a belief in his guilt” (Stoner,
435).
The power of sensationalism is strongly exhibited in the previous two stories, but
the end results aren’t nearly as congruent. A new precedent had been set following the
dramatized news reporting of the 1950s; however, justice seemed to still go in the same
15
direction. Leslie Irvin was eventually convicted of the same crimes that he had been
supposedly mistryed for previously; as for The Misfit, if he were real, we can only
imagine he would be in the same position. Nevertheless, literary critiques and American
historians look at The Misfit and Leslie Irvin in two very different lights. Leslie Irvin is
best known for six murders, being cold and stoic, and possibly transforming the standards
of journalism. On the other hand, The Misfit is different. Readers get the chance to see
who The Misfit could be: a quick glimpse into the life of a man who possibly could have
been better than society turned him out to be. In an ironic turn of events, the grandmother
is brutally gunned down by the Misfit after finally coming to the personal realization of
what the religion she was trying to preach truly meant. That cathartic moment seemed to
be enough to move the reader, but it was only enhanced by the quotation followed by The
Misfit. “’She would of been a good woman,’ The Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody
there to shoot her every minute of her life’” (O’Connor). There is something even more
emotionally incomprehensible about the story when it is revealed that the antagonist of
the story exhibits an understanding of the concept that the protagonist took so long to
grasp. As readers, it gives us hope in humanity when novelists and short story writers
give that inside look. In the same breath, there’s an eerie nervousness that is felt when we
realize that we have sympathized with the man who is responsible for the deaths of three
children, a mother and father, and a grandmother.
In Cold Blood and the 1959 Holcomb, Kansas Murders
Less than ten years later, following the haunting short story presented by Flannery
O’Connor, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith had the state of Kansas buzzing in disbelief.
The two inmates, lacking money and direction, decided that the Clutter family of
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Holcomb, Kansas, would be the target of their robbery. Upon the night of November 15,
1959, Hickock and Smith allegedly killed the entire Clutter family to no avail, as there
was no money inside the safe as expected. This comparison of journalism and literature is
different than the previous two because it involves the writer of In Cold Blood, Truman
Capote, following the details of this crime to Holcomb, Kansas. It was there that he and
his childhood friend Harper Lee gathered pages upon pages of information that
eventually became the book In Cold Blood. The book was not completed until 1966;
seven years after the murder originally took place. Upon In Cold Blood’s release to the
public, it was originally released as a serial in The New Yorker, gaining a great deal of
fame, which was quickly noticed by Random House Publishing.
The popularity of In Cold Blood made plenty of sense in the realm of Holcomb,
Kansas. It offered a chance for the peoples of Holcomb to reflect on what had happened
nearly a decade earlier, but what made it such a phenomenon across the nation? For the
first time in a novel format, there was no expectation of an ending or the fundamental
details as how we got to that ending. The nation had already been informed of the
murders of Holcomb, Kansas, the men that committed them, and the basic story. The
suspense no longer lay in the plot but rather the characters and the details of their lives. In
reporting a story that had already been reported, the characters would singlehandedly
become responsible for advancing interest in the case. In Cold Blood was the first to
attempt such a feat, and it quickly became a point of controversy because of that.
Unlike the previous two comparisons made, this was actually a case that was
fueled by the personal details of Hickock and Smith’s lives. Actually, every detail of the
murders came as a point of interest to the nation; the obscure relationship between the
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two murderers, the brutality of the murder, and the air of mystery that came from the
hidden identity of the killers were just a few details that had the Midwest on edge. The
true controversy began to arise in regard to the transfer of the details from the murder
itself to the novel In Cold Blood.
In Cold Blood was characterized as a new form of factual reporting, but skeptics
were nervous about how accurate such a report could be. Nick Rance of Middlesex
University writes in “‘Truly Serpentine:’ ‘New Journalism’, In Cold Blood and the
Vietnam War,” “Capote was to acknowledge that the upbeat finale of In Cold Blood,
redressing the potential pathos of the scene of the executions of Dick and Perry, was his
own invention” (88). In such a case that the author openly admits that he took creative
liberties with a factual story, the question is posed of how literal a reader can invest in a
nonfiction novel. In addition, there is also the ethical question of how moral it is to
market a novel marked as nonfiction when the author is indeed not soliciting the exact
factual account of a situation. With the development of this new style, journalism is put
on the chopping block by having its name tied to the nonfiction novel genre. Nick Rance
continues, “The claim of ‘new journalists’ to be new was that they would report the
current scene with no inhibition about availing themselves of the technical devices and
much of the imaginative freedom hitherto assumed to be prerogatives of fiction” (80).
The idea that any audience should consider In Cold Blood or any nonfiction novel an
extended outlet of journalism should be dismissed. Because of the creative liberties
mentioned above, there is entirely too much bias influencing the final product of a work
of literature based on actual occurrences to qualify it as a journalistic source. Capote even
concedes to the idea that there is a creative art that goes into the work of a non-fiction
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novel that prohibits its journalist credibility, “Why should we trouble with factual writing
when we're able to invent our own stories, contrive our own characters and themes? –
journalism is only literary photography, and unbecoming to the serious writer's artistic
dignity” (Plimpton).
On the other hand, there should be special consideration given to the fact that
novels of this type do find the majority of their inspiration from actual events. Many of
the reviews that surfaced right after In Cold Blood was released contained a lot of
criticism in regard to many different components of the novel. However, there was one
important element that remained nearly ignored. Scholar, Trenton Hickman, comments,
“Whether these reviews were positive or negative, however, most failed to perceive
Capote's spectacle as anything but what New York Times writer Conrad Knickerbocker
called ‘a total evocation of reality’, debating instead the text's proper genre. Nor were
initial reviewers unduly troubled by Capote's lingering, supervisory presence…”
(Hickman). However skewed journalism may have been at the time that the 1959 murders
in Kansas were committed, it should be noted that the journalistic efforts that were made
in regard to those murders, Hickock and Smith were reported on from multiple
perspectives and newspapers. By submitting to the, not only singular, but creatively
instrumented perspective of Truman Capote, perspective of the murders is limited to only
one point of view.
Like the other examples, Capote’s In Cold Blood does offer an insight to the
murder that cannot be offered through journalistic approach. Most of the articles
reviewed from the 1959 murders present the situation from a particularly legal
standpoint. The logistics are all included; still, there isn’t a lot of variation between
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articles. There is a dependence of language that invokes the reader’s attention and
provides a visual that wouldn’t otherwise be comprehendible. A 1960 article from The
Hammond Times entitled “2 Are Held in Slaying of Kansas Family” leads with, “A
slender ex-convict says four members of a prominent Kansas Farm family met death last
November because he and a fellow robber ‘didn’t want any witnesses’” (“Two Are Held”
A2). Journalists relied solely on quotations from the convicts, officials, and legal
personnel directly involved with the case. One of journalism’s maxims and most
confounding restrictions is that journalism is worthless if it is not timely. Because of this
factor, journalists are not presented with the opportunities to get to truly know their
subject matter, that is, if he or she wants the article to appear on the front page.
In contrast, Truman Capote had six years and an assistant in Harper Lee to collect
pages upon pages of information, including intimate interviews with the murderers.
Because of the time allotted to his creative endeavors, Capote was not restricted to
merely reporting on what happened. He was able to get to know the characters he would
be writing about and terrifyingly attempt to place readers inside of the minds of the
murderers that committed such heinous acts. The biggest difference between this
comparison and the latter two is ultimately that this is not a chronological detail of the
murders; actually, this is not a standard composition of a murder story at all. The book is
presented almost as a set of details that merely act as a supplement to the details of the
murder already released. As previously stated, no one needed to know why the murders
were committed, nor did they need to understand who was murdered or how. Those
details had already been reported. The first quarter of In Cold Blood, entitled, “The Last
to See Them Alive” ends ominously as Mr. Smith and Mr. Hickock were pulling up to
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the Clutter house to commit the murders (Capote 74). The next quarter jumps directly
into the aftermath of the murders; the entirety of the book leaves an air of eeriness
because it provides a framework that requires the reader to endure the murders over and
over again without truly ever enduring the murder. Unlike many other murder novel
examples, this book does not present the conflict as much as it presents the resolve that
eventually gives the reader some sense of peace, just as passively as the murder topic was
introduced. Capote writes,
Dewey looked at the gray stone inscribed with four names, and the date of
their death: November 15, 1959…he called after her as she disappeared
down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry, her smooth hair swinging,
shining—just as a young woman as Nancy might have been. Then, starting
home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the
big sky, the whisper of the wind voice in the wind-bent wheat. (342-43)
Capote takes a different approach to ending the novel; the fact that there are really no
survivors or mourners for the Clutter family lends to the eeriness of the novel. All that
was left were investigators and townspeople, but the memory of the Clutter family, for all
intensive purposes, was left to no one. Capote merely represented a couple years in time,
documented so closely as to pull direct quotations from personal conversations, but other
than that, he paints nothing more than a terrible moment in another family’s existence.
The intrigue that brought Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to research the murder was not to
rewrite history or provide a special name to the family that would have otherwise been
unmentioned; Capote was merely doing what would have otherwise been unnoted in
standard journalism. He tied up the loose ends of the Clutter family.
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In an interview conducted by George Plimpton of The New York Times, Truman
Capote details what is probably most evidently the largest struggle that a non-fiction
novelist must face. In response to a question inquiring about his emotionality and
personal complications from In Cold Blood, Capote states, “Yes, it was a problem.
Nevertheless, I felt in control throughout. However, I had great difficulty writing the last
six or seven pages. This even took a physical form: hand paralysis. I finally used a
typewriter--very awkward as I always write in longhand” (Plimpton).
The journalistic narrative that became In Cold Blood could credit itself to many
different successful components. The effort of two writers over six years working with
the story of two perfect murderous candidates lent itself to the book’s creation. However,
the more important topic for discussion is that it yielded the creation of an entirely new
genre of literature, the non-fiction novel. Forty-five years later, that novel is still being
questioned for its journalistic credibility. In regard to Capote’s previous quote, I don’t
think that Truman Capote was too concerned with encompassing the authenticity of
journalism within his novel. He did, nevertheless, invest some of the most intimate and
personal details of Holcomb, Kansas, citizens into nearly four hundred pages of writing.
He knew the citizens he worked with; he understood their confusion and their fear. In two
years time, Capote had become a citizen of Holcomb, and that’s why In Cold Blood
became a national success. In the interview with Plimpton, he openly states that
Holcomb, Kansas, had not previously heard of Capote prior to his arrival for interviews.
The success of Capote’s journalistic edge is not the factor that should be measured in
reference to this novel; readers should be aware that there is an insurmountable advantage
that Capote received writing from the angle that he did. Novelists have time on their side
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in a way that journalists could only dream of. Readers should judge Capote on how well
he conveyed the stories of Holcomb. In the moments that readers sympathized with
Hickock and Smith’s personal deterioration or chilled at the thought of the final words
over the gravestone, that’s the instant that readers should come to the conclusion that
Capote did something correct along the way. The journalism surrounding the 1959
Kansas murders of the Clutter family worked to instill fear and common interest within
its readers. In Cold Blood, however, sat a book in front of a man and made him become
acquainted with those involved, and that is more terrifying than any headline ever could
be.
Rage and The Columbine High School Shooting
At the end of the twentieth century, leading up into the twenty-first, new interest
in adolescent murder, both in journalism and literature were beginning to be documented.
The concept of killing or injuring thirty-six people had become baffling to the nation.
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris made no attempt to cover up their crime like the Jon Benet
case, nor were they Leslie Irvin, randomly killing strangers as he passed them out and
about in public. He was not Richard Hickock or Perry Smith; there was no money
involved in the process. There are two factors that distinctly separate these two boys from
any of the examples provided so far: Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were children. In
addition to their juvenile age, there was something devastatingly emotional about these
murders: an exigency that had previously been nearly unrecognized. The random
components consisting of Marilyn Manson, video games, and the “goth subculture” were
only additives that latched on to the driving factor. The mental state of both of these boys
was that of two emotionally abused people; if there were ever a dichotomy between
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journalism objectivity and literary subjectivity, it could be observed in the documents
produced from and based off of the events of the Columbine High School Massacre.
However, popularization of school shootings was nothing new in the literary
world. In 1977, Stephen King, then under the penname Richard Bachman, released what
would be the first of “The Bachman Books.” Rage, his haunting first person narrative of
troubled teen, Charlie Decker, raised more than a couple eyebrows as Decker
unabashedly tore through the hallways of his high school shooting teachers. Unlike many
contemporary novels and portrayals of school shootings, King approaches the novel from
a completely narrative standpoint. There is no explanation for the shooting other than the
account that the shooter offers, and because of his very apparent altered mental state, the
author is completely unreliable. The novel begins,
The morning I got it on was nice; a nice May morning. What made it nice
was that I'd kept my breakfast down, and the squirrel I spotted in Algebra
II. I sat in the row farthest from the door, which is next to the windows,
and I spot-ted the squirrel on the lawn. The lawn of Placerville High
School is a very good one. It does not fuck around. It comes right up to the
building and says howdy. (King 1)
The tone seems reasonably commonplace for a high school junior; however, the dialogue
takes a very sudden turn for the worse when the reader learns that Charlie is being
brought to the principal for hitting a teacher in the head with a wrench; it follows when
Charlie opens fire on school faculty. The hackneyed tone quickly becomes more eerie
than trite as King’s portrayal of Charlie becomes more and more threatening.
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The terror that readers feel in Rage becomes the intangible star of the novel, even
more so than Charlie Decker; however, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris quickly became
the social experiment that captivated a nation. In each of the previous comparisons,
authors have had the advantage of crafting their killers. The stories of the victims and the
murderers alike are expounded upon to a level as basic as physical description to the
complexities of the stories that placed them in the room that delivered their fates.
However, in Rage, the story is being delivered from a perspective so personal to the
individual that the reader is not allowed to take the same exploratory journey into his
motives. The Columbine High School shootings, on the other hand, opened up a new type
of journalistic reporting.
The sensationalized shootings were so incomprehensible for so many weekly
viewers that the public demanded some kind of explanation for why it happened. The
media perpetuated stereotyped explanations that could now be perceived as a surface
level reasoning. The problem facing that reasoning is the uncanny similaritiy that it has in
comparison to high school judgment and gossip. In the article “Reflecting on Columbine
High: Ideologies of Privilege in ‘Standardized’ Schools,” Karen L. Tonso writes, “During
television newscasts, lean-cut, White, well-dressed students from the Columbine area
talked about the ‘shooters’ and characterized them as “weirdos,” members of an alleged
cult called “the trench coat Mafia.” In newspaper and radio broadcasts, students also
mentioned ‘Goths,’ ‘geeks,’ and ‘nerds’ as kinds of ‘weird’ students” (Tonso 391). By
enabling such opinions to suffice for journalism, the reporting on the Columbine
shootings had no other option but to become personal. Contemporary journalism, in some
cases, has allowed opinion to substitute the stagnancy of general facts; we have become a
25
society so enveloped in the answers to the unanswerable questions that we have forced
ourselves into an unethical corner of thinking. As long as the public is presented with an
answer, be it fact or opinion, we are comforted by the idea that we have clarity to fall
asleep with.
In Rage, Stephen King presents a starkly different approach to the life of the
adolescent killer. The question of who controls the narrative throughout the novel is
widely debated, but it can be concluded that the outside forces of the public are not to be
taken into consideration in the piece. The novel is almost explicitly told from the
perspective of the killer, Charlie Decker, with the exception of only a few chapters.
Scholar, Chris Pourteau, writes,
The events of 29 of those chapters occur two years before Charlie’s
‘present’ (when he is telling the story), and entail the events taking place
between the hours of 9:05 am and 1:00 pm on the day Charlie takes over
his class. With the exception of Chapter 33, as noted above, the reader can
assume that Charlie has a varying measure of control of the narrative
throughout the novel. (Pourteau 174)
Upon further analysis, there is something increasingly haunting that the killer doubles as
the protagonist throughout the novel and as the reader’s primary source of reliable
information. Similar to the previous comparisons, the literary aspect of Rage provides
Stephen King that ability to personalize his killer’s experience; still, there is arguably a
stark contrast between Charlie Decker and the previous three fiction based killers. The
personalized information that readers receive about Charlie Decker doesn’t obviously
relate to the school based murders. The details of his life become too personal at times,
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taking us inside the life of Charlie. Those moments not only distract the reader from the
situation at hand but also serve as a tool to bring the onlooker too close to Charlie to fully
understand his reasoning for murder. With those details divulged, King presents a
situation that does not allow its readers to explain the justification for murder committed
by a character they have come to know all too well.
These personal details mimic many of those that can be observed in the case of
the Columbine shooters. Because of the personal exposure of the late killers, Klebold and
Harris became the basis for many other works of fiction including Give a Boy a Gun and
Nineteen Minutes, which author Jodi Picoult states was a direct inspiration for the novel.
In an interview, she states, “ I spoke with them [Jefferson County Police Department],
and they sent me DVDs and material that had never been made available to the public,
which helped a bit to get into the mindset of the [Columbine] shooters” (Picoult). The
national phenomenon that had become the lives of the Columbine shooters had captured
the attention of Americans on such a large scale that it still has an impact of fictional
media production today. In an article entitled, “Freaks, Aliens, and the Social Other,”
writer Murray Forman states,
In the post-Columbine television programs this aspect of recognition is
frequently depicted as a struggle for visibility and the difficult endeavor to
inscribe one’s presence in the minds and psyches of others who are
deemed more popular or more desirable…jocks and cheerleaders occupy
the pinnacle of the high school hierarchy and society in general, resulting
in tainted relationships with the subordinated social Others… (Forman 7274)
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The sensationalized techniques used in the reporting of the Columbine shootings opened
up a discussion about the social hierarchy and the dangers that social standing places
upon its victors and victims.
Stephen King was not oblivious to this societal ladder either, as he places one
student in particular, Ted Jones, at the top of Rage’s chain. Ted is portrayed as the levelheaded “big man on campus.” He is the dissenter within the classroom and ultimately
portrayed as the moral antagonist to the shooter, Charlie. One of the most interesting
aspects of King’s novel is the presentation of its characters within. In any other standard
novel, Ted Jones would be a strong leader. However, within the context of the story and
its narrative perspective, Ted seals his fate by being the archetypal protagonist. Ted, the
singular student referenced in the following passage, is truly an outcast in the school
shooting situation; what lends to the horrifying aspect of it all is that by the time the day
is over, Stephen King has ultimately shaped the entire class to understand the motives of
Charlie Decker. Scholar Sherry R. Truffin writes, “After the initial shock subsides, his
[Charlie] classmates join him in a strange form of group therapy that concludes with the
ritual humiliation and abuse of the single straight-laced non-participant. As Charlie puts
it, school was cancelled for the day, but ‘in room 16, education went on’” (Truffin, 201).
Not only is there a sacrificial lamb, but there is also an acceptance of sacrificing that
person by the other students in the class. This same motif can be observed in many of
King’s other novels, including Carrie and The Mist. The idea of this dissenting portrayal
of acceptance of the bad deed is what makes Stephen King such a successful horror
writer, and when paired with the terror that follows a school shooting, there is little to no
confusion as to why Rage isn’t normally included in school shooting literature. This
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novel in particular lacks the pathos and establishment of sympathy that many of the
aforementioned novels include.
However, though it does not follow the standard protocol for a novel within its
genre, Rage continues to be discussed and controversial because it was given the
appropriate resource to become the well constructed piece of literature it is known as
now: time. However, journalism’s infamous timeliness can be observed in articles that
were written just one day after the Columbine shooting. In a New York Times article
entitled “Students of the Fringe Found a Way to Stand Out,” it is evident that this
journalist, in addition to many others, had found an appropriate angle to move papers.
The headline alone suggests a “let’s discuss the moths thrust into the flame by social
pressure and media influence.” The injustice truly is the fact that neither boy ever truly
had the chance to be anything other than what media outlets and “personal” interviews
painted them to be. Quotations from the article such as “Fellow students and people in the
surrounding neighborhood said the faces of the group’s members were sometimes
covered in white makeup and dark eyeliner, and their tongues were dripping with hatred
for racial minorities and athletes” followed by quotations pulled from what is assumed to
be some random kid excited to be interviewed stating, “It was that kind of devilish, halfdead, half-alive look” when referencing the faces of Klebold and Harris ultimately paint
them to be the characters that the media needed to have to try and explain this tragedy.
(Pulley A17). Of course, the strategically written article sold plenty of copies of New
York Times, but at what cost?
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Conclusion
A reader, in hindsight, has to ask himself how ethical it is to portray anyone, killer
or not, in such a light without that person having the ability to defend his or her character.
Truly, how relevant are the details of the makeup worn or the presumed hatred that
“dripped off their tongues?” Those rhetorical questions contribute to the biggest question
of all; when juxtaposed by the growing sensation of true crime novels, how far is too far
for a publication when it comes to embellishing the details of journalism for reader’s
interest? By definition, isn’t journalism supposed to be the unbiased reporting of factual
material to a broad audience through research? It seems that including the subtle details
of makeup and opinion based observations that blatantly reflect on the characters of those
unrepresented seems to toe a very fine line between a journalistic effort and the very
aspect of In Cold Blood that Truman Capote references to disqualify the novel as
“journalism.” There is very little room for creative effort in journalism, if any at all.
In reflecting on the previous four comparisons, there are some underlying themes
that can be observed throughout each one. Literature will always have an advantage over
journalism, at least when it comes to the creative aspect. A novelist or short story writer
has the ability to craft a character and shape them to be whomever he or she wants; even
in the case of characters based on actual people, as Hickock and Smith were in Capote’s
In Cold Blood. The author is virtually unlimited in his art, and can make a killer the
reader’s friend just as he can make the victim the reader’s enemy. However, it must be
noted that journalism is a different medium entirely. The characters have already been
named, and the crime has already been committed. If that were not enough, those
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characters must find their way to the front page of the newspaper or magazine or other
media outlets within a few days if not hours or they run the risk of their presence being
lost in the plague of other stories that are constantly inhabiting the world.
The journalist’s ability to shape the perception of a murderer or a victim is
fundamentally decreased. We know that some terrible person is responsible for killing a
sweet, innocent, young girl. We understand the back-story of Jon Benet because luckily,
her influential family of Colorado embarked on most every opportunity to introduce her
posthumously. Conversely, we know that the person who killed her is a terrible person
because killing is bad. Nevertheless, that is a reader’s only justification of evaluating that
person’s character in such a manner. A journalist faces the struggle of limited knowledge
and limited time. Thus, we see the contemporary journalist testing the boundaries of
ethical reporting by using details such as the ones listed in the Columbine article that
provide a personality to those reported upon. The lack of ability to shape perception leads
to a decline is desire to read. Our nation is one that thrives on knowing as much
knowledge as we can; we have become so nosey that it is our job to understand every
detail that surrounds a rape, a murder, or any other scandal because it is the way that we
have come to best comprehend life.
Literature has never faced that same struggle. The greatest struggle that literature
faces is developing the newest type of thrill. Even in the past half century, partially due to
the influx of writing on the subject matter, we have become bored with what used to
enthrall readers to an alarming level. As we became disinterested in the heroic style
efforts of Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger, authors such as Capote delved into the
actual lives of killers, exploring their minds and divulging his findings on paper. Flannery
31
O’Connor developed fictionalized murders that have no true exigency, and even then,
readers grew tired of randomized serial killings. Eventually, authors have resorted to
child victims and assailants, spinning the innocence of childhood in such a way that it
mimics the complexity of adult life. There must always be a change in the subject matter,
because much like journalism, repeating the same story with stock characters and
plotlines becomes monotonous and eventually, obsolete.
So who is to blame Mark Twain for encouraging those aspiring writers to write
what you know? At that time, I can’t be sure if Mark Twain could fathom someone
knowing about a school wide shooting or the unanswerable murder of a six year old
beauty queen. It is evident though that Twain’s advice was subject to change over a
century. Journalists are boxed into a corner, restricted to write only on the knowledge
allotted to them by the terror of the events unfolding, and still, that is not enough for
some onlookers. The notion of encouraging writers to write what they feel instills a
whole different type of fear within me, because we start to notice the uprising of some of
the most complex and twisted writing that has been published to date. Those words do
not stop on the page either; writers must face the consequences of what those words can
do and how they may affect people. There is a responsibility that follows writing what
we feel down on the page because sometimes, it feels as intimidating to place the gun in a
character’s hands as it would holding it in our own.
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CHAPTER II
THE FIRST PERSON NARRATIVE AND STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Introduction
Some people are better at telling stories than others. For my entire life, my dad
has always had a knack for taking trivial events from his life and turning each instance
into a grandeur story that has his audience sitting on the edge of their seats. I, too, have
been instilled with the ability to tell my own stories, as long as it’s my own experience.
On the other hand, whenever I’ve tried to recreate the stories he has told about his life
and the series of events that unfold, the story comes across slightly less enthralling. He
has established his own voice over the years with his own brand of vocabulary and
suspense. He understands, without thinking, when to reflect and digress; every word has a
purpose and every pause is carefully placed within each sentence. It’s a gift for a person
to be able to create those stories, and there is something particularly meaningful that
those stories are based on the details of his own life.
How is it though that the stories of one man can be so compelling when spoken or
written from the source but lose meaning when recreated from a secondhand narrator?
It’s as if storytelling is a game of telephone; we begin by whispering our thoughts and
memories into another person’s ear, depending on him to be able to recreate those
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memories as accurately as we recall them in our head. For the most part, the story is
recreated in concrete details, recalling the most tangible moments that enabled the second
narrator to envision it in his mind. However, what is lost in translation are the moments
that made that memory so important to the original narrator. The tone and perspective, no
matter how subtle each may be, provide a foundation that is unmatched for any narrative
piece, whether spoken or written. There is a common theory that witnesses only
remember ten percent of what is seen at a crime scene or any event for that matter. The
same applies to the stories we tell. Experience is individualized to the person witnessing
it, and that perspective cannot be recreated. The storyteller knows when to use inflection
or irony; the tone is almost innate because it’s our voices’ way of conveying the emotions
that only we know.
That is the power of the first person narrative; readers become immersed in the
development and contemplations that a person goes through, and if written properly, a
fictitious character can make a reader laugh, cry, or even throw a book across the room.
The plot, while important, usually follows the rule that most contemporary writing has
succumbed to; almost all material has been written on before. The element of creative
plot has become nearly obsolete. The new objective has become less concentrated on the
storyline and more focused on the angle that the storyline is being told. Much like most
of the world of artistic development, the idea of completely new material is hard to find.
History has a tendency to repeat itself, however, the people that make history happen are
completely different. Humans sympathize with the experience, but they find the most
interest in how a particular person deals with the normal perils of life. That is the
difference in the shift. Our question of faith in humanity begs us to find the answer
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whether or not we as a population will succeed or not. The interesting part is that the first
person perspective is nothing new; actually, the first person perspective is arguably the
most archaic form of storytelling. Before humankind began telling the stories of one
another, people have focused on the stories each of them have personally survived to tell.
As an anthropocentric society, it is no surprise that the experiences that humans have
found most intriguing are the narratives that are created from their own experience.
As a society, we have become accustomed to peeping into the lives of others.
People tune in weekly to watch “reality shows” based around individuals they’ve never
met or previously known of before. However, we return weekly to see if Kelly and
Sarah’s rivalry will finally come to a head. Who are Kelly and Sarah? We have no idea,
but they offer a facet of life that takes us away from our own. This is not a new concept
by any stretch; authors have reached into their psyche and created characters that
otherwise would have lived voiceless inside of the heads of their creators. Each of those
characters comes to life on the page, and how else would the population of the world
rather get to know each of them but on a first name basis? Clarissa Vaughn is just another
lesbian living in New York City, overly concerned with floral arrangements and the
wellbeing of a man who would rather be taking care of himself. Skeeter Phelan is just
another precocious woman who believes she has the ability to change the world, just like
everyone else. Clay Jensen walks through the halls of a high school where he is neither
popular, nor hated, just a figment of someone who could possibly be important, given the
right circumstances. It isn’t until we delve into the mind of Clarissa that we find that she
values herself no more than a passerby would regard her on the street. Skeeter’s potential
isn’t realized until readers have experienced the sheer ostracism and risk that she
35
contemplates so carefully in her mind while writing her book. Clay becomes a tragic hero
as readers listen along with him to the tapes revealing the moments of happiness that he
created for his late-classmate, Hannah.
Simple spectators have suddenly been transformed into children watching their
mother come to terms with the insignificance of life, siblings watching their brother face
the concept of death in the cruelest way, friends who desperately want to support a young
girl facing an impossible task. An author has truly created magic when those readers long
to reach through the page and hug a character, just to be able to offer a moment of
comfort in a helpless situation. The level of personal effect is only heightened when an
author assumes the daunting task of the stream of consciousness. In choosing this
narrative style, the author engrosses himself in the thought flow of the character. In doing
so, readers learn some of the most personal and haunting details of a character’s life that
pushes the narrative forward as powerfully as the plot.
Charlotte Gilman Perkins explores the concept of stream of consciousness in her
semi-autobiographical short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The style pushed the
conventional style of writing of the late 19th century by diving into the psyche of a
woman suffering from a mental illness. The short story serves as a feminist piece that
acted as a powerful force in literature for a growing feminist movement in America, but
why? Her chilling approach places the reader in the mind of the narrator, begging the
question if this woman is even fit to be telling her own story. Perkins writes,
I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at
night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front
pattern does move -- and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!
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Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes
only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.
(Perkins)
There is something truly fascinating about what Perkins is able to construct within
the story. In the quoted chapter, readers watch a woman justifying the movement of a
static wall, explaining it as if “the woman” behind the patterns is less of an anomaly and
more of a pity case. The true essence of her main character could have been captured
without approaching her dialogue through stream of consciousness, but at what price?
For those authors brave enough, the stream of consciousness narrative has the ability to
bring a character to life that can be unsettling to readers (just wait until “The Yellow
Wallpaper’s” protagonist starts to gnaw at the bedpost).
Audiences find themselves enamored with the notion of these characters
regardless of their histories. How is it that thousands of readers find the life of “The
Yellow Wallpaper’s” protagonist so hypnotic? It’s simple. The element that makes the
first person narrative and stream of consciousness so powerful though is not primarily
found in the concept of telling a story; the key is within the storytelling. Anyone can
write down a first person account of something that has happened to him or her or a
character he or she has imagined from within. It’s as if an author is doing personal
journalism on someone that he or she knows. However, it is when an author distinguishes
that character or story by use of voice, perspective, and experience that the stories of
human existence truly come to life. Telling a story is simple: we revolve around facts and
details that make the story particular enough to stand alone. When an author is a
storyteller though, there is an unidentifiable moment that the reader is compelled to finish
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the journey through the words and phrases because a combination of voice, suspense, and
characterization has developed a spirit of compassion and necessity to understand the
protagonist’s life. Through a discussion of three classic pieces of literature, as well as
three contemporary selections, the strategies and techniques of this personal style will be
explained to give a better understanding of what has made the first person narrative and
stream of consciousness a thriving literary perspective in novels and short stories for
ages.
The First Person Narrative in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
The Help, and Thirteen Reasons Why
In terms of American literature, Mark Twain set an unmatchable standard for the
first person narrative in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As one of the most
challenged and respected books in American literature, many times readers and school
teachers cannot get past the political correctness of the book, calling into question the
legitimacy of racial slurs and slanted opinions in terms of the narrator’s perspective.
Because of those arguments, some never get the opportunity to delve into the treasure
trove that is the language and narrative logistics of the story itself.
As for the first person narrative, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn call two
very important elements into question: use of the vernacular, which Twain is attributed to
in terms of American literature, and the unreliable narrator. Previous to its publication,
Huckleberry Finn, had no distinguished predecessor that had undertaken the challenge of
writing in the vernacular on such a large stage. Katherine Buxbaum of American Speech
writes, “Someone…has called Mark Twain ‘the divine amateur.’ It is a subtle analysis.
Not that the genius of the great humorist is obscured by his lack of training in authorship.
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But it is unfortunate that he made pretensions of skill where he was but a learner”
(Buxbaum 233). The late 19th century had been characterized by a movement toward a
more common lexicon, but that focus was primarily on the simplification of language as
opposed to Twain’s attempt to regionalize the vocabulary. In doing so, Twain
revolutionized what characterization has become today. The way that readers come to
understand the character of Huck, Tom, and Jim is through these moments of complete
honesty, which are only exemplified by their use of the vernacular, like in the following
excerpt:
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in
my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but
laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all
this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And
went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I
see Jim before me all the time; in the day and in the night-time, sometimes
moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing
and laughing. (Twain 296)
Because of the first person narrative approach, readers are put inside the mind of
Huckleberry Finn, hearing his speech the same way that a Mississippi youth of the time
would have spoken. This excerpt, taken from the point in the book that Huck Finn makes
the ultimate decision to help Jim escape from slavery, puts the reader in a place that it
seems as if the contemplation is as much his or her decision as it is Huck’s. The level of
personal struggle here is only heightened in the way that Huck’s voice not only gives the
reader insight as to who he is but also as to where he comes from.
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Published in 1885, America had only been relieved of the American Civil War for
twenty years. Most of the novel presents quite a comedic look on the lives of Southern
adolescence and life in Mississippi. However, it’s at this point that we start to observe
Huck as a more complex character, challenged with the decision to maintain the maxims
of his raising or to abandon those attributes for the more moral decision. Critics have
questioned Twain’s shift in tone and characterization of Huck, saying that the
contemplation is out of context with the rest of the story’s plotline. Janet A. GablerHover writes in The Journal of Narrative Technique,
Huck’s final actions are an initiation rite into the adult struggle with a
death-like world: ‘For the first time in the book Huck is completely secure
and relaxed, and, despite his pledges to Jim, he is going to enjoy himself;
for he is, we are constrained to see, an easygoing white boy first of all and
the dedicated friend of the black slave Jim second. (Gabler-Hover 68)
If anything, when reading a first person narrative, readers have to remember that the one
person in the world that knows the character they’re reading about the best is the person
who created him or her. With that being said, the importance of consistency, as well as
growth and development, within a character is an extremely important line that must be
considered when creating a character.
The voice and stance that Twain created is magnificent because we see a young
boy who is very obviously a product of the South. Huck even calls into question whether
or not prayer is necessary following the events of freeing Jim. One of his most sincere
lines follows his monologue debating Jim’s freedom in which he says, “All right, then,
I’ll go to hell” (Twain 297). However, if readers cannot observe some kind of change in
40
the character’s words they are reading, the lead character quickly becomes stagnant and
many of the other elements that strengthen a first person narrative become obsolete. The
voice and perspective of a character is only worth something when a reader has an
emotion that fuels him or her to continue on to the next page. Much like human
interaction, we as people are bored with the concepts of apathy and stagnancy; readers
want to support a character with a direction, and Huck offers that to those who take the
time to observe his life.
What makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn such an interesting read for so
many is the fact that readers are immersed in the colloquialisms and thought process of
Huckleberry Finn. Though it does not seem that obvious of a point to be noted, the words
of Huck Finn are not words that can ultimately be trusted. His perspective is skewed in so
many different directions that Huck Finn has become the epitome of the unreliable
narrator. Everyone remembers that friend in elementary school that would do anything on
command just because he could be so easily swayed. We see a lot of those same qualities
in Huck Finn as his view points seem to sway from one side to the other based on the
company he is around at the time. Even in the final chapters when his confidence and
stance is much more apparent, Huck is still a caricature of a time that most modern
readers find difficulty relating to. The inability to relate to Huck though is not one that
permits the reader to not be able to enjoy the piece. Literary analyst, Paul Lynch writes,
Because Twain allows Huck to tell his own tale, the reader witnesses
what Bakhtin calls an ideological becoming, a struggle between
authoritative discourse and internally-persuasive discourse… Throughout
the novel, he struggles to trust his own instincts, to listen to his sound
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heart, and to get out of the way of his own words; he also struggles against
the hypocrisy of the authority that he encounters along the river. (Lynch
173-4)
Lynch makes an excellent point. Because Huck is allowed to tell his entire journey, no
matter how wavering it may be throughout, the plot of the novel becomes less important
and the development of Huck Finn takes precedence over the adventures that are being
chronicled. Furthermore, readers easily forgive the shortcomings and changes that Huck
is going through within the course of the novel because of the sincerity that the first
person narrative provides. The idea that readers are working specifically with Huck Finn
and the development of his character makes complete sense within the context of the
novel, and the unreliability of the narrator seems more reliable than any outside source.
The definition and concept of unreliability depends strictly on what the reader is choosing
to rely on.
If you’re reading from a sociological standpoint observing life in late nineteenth
century America, sure, Huck is not the boy you want telling you the story. A third person
perspective would lend itself much better to that type of perspective; the objectivity
would give way to a more appropriate historical context. However, if readers take a step
back to witness Huck’s life and the journey of a boy through moral and personal
contemplation, then there is no other valid option to have. Readers find authenticity and
sincerity within the first person narrative; without that voice and bias, we would have no
Huck nor would we have the inner conflict that truly captures the story within. When
taken back to the roots, the novel’s purpose is to push readers into the lives of fictitious
souls that might reveal something special about their own. The choices that are being
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made by Huck are ultimately for the benefit and betterment of Huck’s life. If a reader is
reading this piece with the intention of witnessing the life of a young boy who is coming
to understand the experiences of the world, the argument could be made that he is the
most reliable narrator of all. Each life is different and complex; there is no fair
comparison that can be made regarding the legitimacy of one life in comparison to
another. Any reader who debates the authenticity of Huck’s late nineteenth century
perspective is arguing a battle that could possibly be detrimental to the aesthetic
experience that the novel offers.
It is the unreliability of the author that ultimately makes the story authentic. If
Huck were seeing the events of his life from a logical, rational standpoint then I’m sure
this story would no longer be listed as first person narrative. That is one element that we
as reader must concede to when reading a first person narrative. There will always be
bias. However, what if the topic of discussion is less personal and more topical? Though
there are many civil rights and race issues embedded in The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, the story ultimately revolves around the life and times of Huck himself. On the
other hand, Kathryn Stockett dives head first into the issue of race in her contemporary
best seller, The Help.
In this opposite approach, The Help seemingly revolves around the stories of three
women. Their stories are told from the first person perspective with each voice giving a
strong characterization of each character that the reader is learning about. However, at the
root of the book race relations is a strong theme and guidepost that connects the stories of
Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter. Set in the same region of the United States with only
eighty year historically separating the setting, Huckleberry Finn and The Help share
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many commonalities between storylines. The set up of the novels are almost contrary to
each other. Twain uses a social issue to tell the personal story of a young man, while
Stockett uses the personal stories of three women to flesh out and give life to a social
issue.
In this case, the multiple first person narrative perspectives help to give a more
three dimensional shape to an issue that almost necessitates a multi-perspective
commentary. Even in just comparing the first lines from each character’s respective
chapter gives the reader a clear indication of the differences in each narrative voice.
Aibileen writes, “Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August 1960. A
church baby we like to call it. Taking care a white babies, that’s what I do, along with all
the cooking and cleaning” (Stockett 1). The next narrator, Minny, writes, “Standing on
that white lady’s back porch, I tell myself, Tuck it in, Minny. Tuck in whatever might fly
out of my mouth and tuck in my behind too” (36). Readers can begin seeing a slight
progression in formality between the first and second narrators, and the voices provide a
strong indication of the behavior they would expect to see from each reader.
Minny, the most colloquial of the three, provides that raw and “in your face” kind
of persona that she never apologizes for. Skeeter, a recent white college graduate,
provides the most formal approach of the narrators. “I drive my mama’s Cadillac fast on
the gravel road, headed home. Patsy Cline can’t even be heard on the radio anymore, for
all the rocks banging on the side of the car” (63). It’s these three narrative voices that
create such a strong element to the novel and allows for the reader to see three different
angles of the issue at hand.
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However, much like Twain in the 20th century, Stockett has faced a fair amount of
criticism following her illustration of the southern dialect and colloquial speak. Book
critic, Michelle Tauber writes,
But along with legions of readers has come controversy: Stockett has
taken flack from some critics for her black characters' heavy Southern
dialect. ‘I was trying to draw a picture of a certain time and place,’ she
says. The novel has also sparked a lawsuit from Ablene Cooper, who
works as a maid for Stockett's brother in Jackson. (Tauber)
However, with any successful use of the first person narrative, especially those
characterized by voice and specification, authors are bound to face the appraisal of
effectiveness and accuracy of the voice used. In essence, Kathryn Stockett also faced a
greater challenge in creating her characters in the same way that Mark Twain faced in
creating Jim; the pressure of creating an accurate African-American character from inside
the head of a Caucasian woman is a daunting and risky task, especially with some of the
more recent negative connotations that the Black English Vernacular (BEV) carries. After
a series of interview studies at DePaul University regarding the BEV, it was summarized,
“three issues that emerged from the interviews are discussed: problems with the label,
Black English Vernacular; the possibility that BEV was socially constructed; and the
perception that BEV is a limited linguistic system. (Sociolinguistics, education, attitudes
toward language varieties, Black English Vernacular)” (Speicher 383). With any race
topic, there’s obviously a fine line between creative license and stereotyped persona.
One of the biggest difficulties in writing a first person narrative is developing a
voice for the narrator. The primary key for an author is creating a character that is
45
compelling enough to be followed; as stated previously, humanity has an interest in the
stories of their fellow man. However, an author has a lot to compensate for when writing
those stories down on paper. A face-to-face interaction provides the recipient of the story
with body language, facial expressions, and voice inflection. An author only has the
words on the page. Kathryn Stockett carefully constructs her character by giving them
each distinct voices and personalities. Minny, arguably the most colorful character in the
novel, is brought to life through her relatable personality and forward approach. Stockett
writes in the voice of Minny,
Even though it’s the third week of October, the summer beats on with the
rhythm of a clothes dryer. The grass in Miss Celia’s yard is still full-blown
green. The orange dahlias are still smiling drunk up at the sun. And every
night, the damn mosquitoes come out for their blood hunt, my sweat pads
went up three cents a box, and my electric fan is broke dead on my kitchen
floor. (Stockett 357)
Minny paints such a fantastic picture of the scenery, but what makes the scenery so
fantastic is the way she describes it. No one besides Minny could move so eloquently
from the mosquitoes to her sweat pads to the electric fan. The best part of it all is that by
this point in the book, readers wouldn’t expect Minny to approach the subject in any
other way. The development of her character gives way to a mesmerizing personality as
well as an individualized lexicon that only Minny could so effortlessly provide.
If developing the language behind her characters isn’t daunting enough of a task,
Stockett undertakes the challenge of developing three individualized characters. In a
novel that literally revolves around the perspectives of “the help” it’s important that
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Minny, Aibileen, and Skeeter all have individual personalities that are portrayed strongly
enough to represent them as individual characters. The multiple perspective approach,
though difficult, can produce a much stronger story based simply on the fact that it is
being approached from so many different angles. In that, it’s necessary that we
understand why each character is looking into the story being presented from the angle
each is. Stockett easily makes a distinction between Skeeter and the maids, but it is
through personality development that we see the differences between Minny and
Aibileen. Stockett uses background information and powerful social ties to bring these
characters to life, but what happens when an author attempts to capture a moment in time
rather than the entire scope of a character?
Jay Asher attempts to do that very thing in Thirteen Reasons Why, a young adult
novel primarily revolving around the characters of Clay Jensen and Hannah Baker.
Another multiple perspective novel, Asher develops a story between two individuals that
actually spend no time together in the context of the book’s time frame. Their only
interactions come from moments from the past being relived through Hannah’s
posthumous tapes left to those who had a hand in her suicide and Clay, the recipient of
tape five, side A. Both characters tell their own stories through the first person narrative,
commenting alternately on the situations that Hannah brings up about her life before the
suicide. Asher provides an excellent example of situational perspective by using the two
characters as an amicable dichotomy. The tragedy lies in the fact that only one character
has the ability to grow from the knowledge gained from the other.
Readers begin the story with Clay sending the tapes to the next person, as the
instructions in Hannah’s tapes ask each recipient to do. Asher then backtracks and begins
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with Clay receiving the tapes. This is not an uncommon tactic, as Melanie D. Koss of
Virginia Tech writes, “These books challenge the traditional linear, chronological, and
single-voiced nature of narrative fiction, which (a) is typically told from the first-person
point of view of the main character, or (b) focuses on a main character but is written in
third person” (Koss). Because of this element, readers start the novel unknowingly seeing
the results of the tapes on Clay. It’s as if reading the first chapter doesn’t fully matter
until the entire book has been read.
The true tension of the book doesn’t fully arise until the reader experiences the
first of Hannah’s suicide tapes. Asher distinguishes between the two authors textually;
Hannah’s dialogue is in italics, and Clay’s dialogue is in standard font. The traditional
shape that accompanies stereo functions such as stop, play, rewind, and fast-forward
further separates their narratives. Hannah’s tapes begin,
“Hello, boys and girls. Hannah Baker here. Live and in stereo. I don’t
believe it. No return engagements. No encore. And this time, absolutely no
requests. No, I can’t believe it. Hannah Baker killed herself. I hope you’re
ready, because I’m about to tell you the story of my life. More specifically,
why my life ended. And if you’re listening to these tapes, you’re one of the
reasons why.” (Asher 7)
Jay Asher creates such an interesting dynamic between Hannah and Clay from moment
go because the narrative style between Hannah and Clay tends to play off of each other.
An immense majority of Clay’s narrative is reactionary, sparking revelations about the
situations at hand and his own life. However, there doesn’t ever seem to be a more
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important narrator in the novel because without Hannah, we have no reason for the tapes,
and without Clay, we have no reaction.
One of the biggest debates among readers is who the story revolves around most.
Is Clay a vehicle for readers to be able to hear the story of Hannah Baker’s untimely
suicide or is Hannah the outlet that lets viewers into the mind of one she left behind? In
an interview with Bryan Gillis of Kennesaw State, Asher answers that question, “That
dual narration, I felt, was the perfect structure for a story like this. The story wouldn’t be
just about what happened to Hannah Baker, but also about one of the people she left
behind and his sometimes contradictory impressions of what she’s saying” (Gillis 544).
After closely reading the book, the argument ultimately cannot be settled. The novel
gives an opportunity for the reader to not have to choose. Another facet of the multiple
perspective narration is that the reader has options; if Hannah’s story doesn’t provide the
kind of personal experience a reader can relate to, Clay’s journey is a viable one to
follow.
Regardless, it should be noted that the core of the book is rooted within the story
of Hannah, and her commentary is what builds some of the most concrete details of the
story. Without the perspective of Hannah, Clay would only have the image of a girl he
was interested in who killed herself for unknown reasons. To an extent, the plotline is
clichéd. However, Hannah’s tapes provide the readers with a victim that can never
completely be figured out. Hannah even goes as far to periodically make jokes about her
own suicide. “Now why would a dead girl lie? Hey! That sounds like a joke. Why would a
dead girl lie? Answer: because she can’t stand up. Is this some kind of twisted suicide
note? Go ahead. Laugh. Oh well, I thought it was funny” (Asher 8). Because of the tone
49
Asher gives to Hannah, the reader is oftentimes puzzled at how to approach Hannah’s
situation. The tone in her voice tends to waver through most of the book, until the end as
the tapes grow in intensity, but still, readers see a side of Hannah that could not have
otherwise been known without her narration.
However, the perspectives within the novel are arguably skewed in the favor of
Clay. Readers get to experience Clay’s introspection and evaluation of all of the tapes.
Even when Hannah explains the nature of Clay’s tape and his innocence in relation to her
suicide, Hannah still comes out of the situation looking more like an antagonist than a
protagonist. Throughout the novel, it is unclear if Hannah is concretely dead until the
book’s ending. Many had speculated if Asher had contemplated an ending in which
Hannah’s fate would have been more positive. In the same interview, Asher responds,
“Originally, yes, I did plan for Hannah to live…When it came time to make a decision
about the ending, I decided to change it out of respect for the seriousness and finality of
suicide. There are no second chances for anyone involved” (Gillis 544). With that
finality, the perspective of Hannah seems as if it would be limited, but it’s the dual
narration that preserves Hannah’s reputation post-humorously.
Arguably, readers learn the most about Hannah not through her tape recordings,
but through Clay’s perception of Hannah, as well as the lengthy narratives that follow the
tapes. Clay reveals the public opinion of Hannah in a way that could not be encompassed
through Hannah’s dialogue. We see glimpses into Clay’s life through Hannah’s tape, as
well as some personal commentary made by Clay himself, but Asher truly makes Hannah
three-dimensional by putting her in the context of Clay’s life. At the conclusion of the
tapes, it reads, “A lot of you cared, just not enough. And that… that is what I needed to
50
find out. But I didn’t know what you were going through, Hannah. And I did find out. The
footsteps continue. Faster. And I’m sorry. The recorder clicks off” (Asher 280). Sure,
even the idea of hearing the final words of someone who has taken his or her life is
traumatizing enough, but when so skillfully placed among the words of the observer who
has known the victim, readers begin to see the true tragedy that stems from Clay’s
narration.
Ultimately, the basis of Thirteen Reasons Why is founded upon the notion that
without one of the characters, there would be no reason to have the other. Like many first
person narratives, the focus of the story seems to be much less about the plot and much
more geared toward a feeling. True to the meaning of catharsis, readers leave the book as
if it were a roller coaster. There are moments when the pain and sorrow of Hannah’s
journey is just too much, but Asher leaves his readers with the feeling of a purpose after.
If anything, we’re inspired to reach out to those around us. With the power of the first
person narrative, writers have the ability to alter the course of the world. Readers have
the opportunity to witness moments in time and hear the perspective of life from the
person who has had the opportunity to live it. However, it becomes even more fascinating
when the author slows it down even further. Clay’s commentary is just a glimpse into the
power of stream of consciousness writing, and it’s a clear indicator that when time is
slowed down to the second, readers have the ability to dissect the character to an even
greater degree.
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Stream of Consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours
As a young child that needed to report on every detail of life, my parents were
constantly telling me to slow down so that they could understand all that I was saying. I
didn’t understand the importance of slowing down from my auctioneer pace because I
had a lot to say, and I needed to say it then. However, there are a lot of details lost in
translation when we as humans blow through our stories. News stories have become more
and more brief so to capture the day’s happenings in a broader context. Society has
become so motivated to know as much as possible in the timeliest manner that it could be
argued that society knows nothing at all. The power of the stream of consciousness is that
every moment is accounted for. The thought process or cataloguing of actions takes the
reader that much deeper into the life of the character being portrayed on the page. When
the moments are slowed down to the time it would take for each to happen, readers are
not only given adequate time to observe the action but evaluate it in his or her head in
context to everything else going on around the character.
With the two selections chosen for discussion, the approach Virginia Woolf and
Michael Cunningham have chosen to take differs from that of the first person narrative
approach. Instead of being intently in the voice and mind of the main character
exclusively, readers find themselves on the outside looking in. Mrs. Dalloway and The
Hours open eerily similar with, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”
(Woolf), and “There are still flowers to buy” (Cunningham 9). Actually, Cunningham
mimics the opening of Mrs. Dalloway in the opening scene to all three of his main
characters, Virginia Woolf, Clarissa Vaughn, and Mrs. Brown. Another similarity in their
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writing, as many stream of consciousness works also have in common, is that Woolf and
Cunningham restrict their time setting to a single day.
However, the stream of consciousness effect leaves a lot of room for
interpretation, especially as far as the narrator is concerned. Cunningham and Woolf take
slightly different approaches in the role of the narrator. Because stream of consciousness
offers a broad spectrum of methods for telling the story, the level of omniscience in the
two stories varies quite a bit. Scholar Henry Allen writes, “There are no such set-piece
descriptions or explanatory portraits in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. The chapters
develop detail, action, thought as they arrive, and so the voice of the novel is not so much
a person as an observance” (Allen 405). One of his strongest examples of this is one of
the most popular passages from within the book: the death of Virginia Woolf. Allen uses
the following example to further illustrate his point, “Here they are, on a day early in the
Second World War: the boy and his mother on the bridge, the stick floating over the
water’s surface, and Virginia’s body at the river’s bottom, as if she is dreaming of the
surface, the stick, the boy and his mother, the sky and the rooks” (Cunningham 8).
There’s certain emptiness and detachment that suggests that Cunningham’s stance as an
author is to capture a moment, not particularly to dissect the characters within that
moment. That’s not to say that Cunningham does not have his moments that he delves
into the minds of all three of his characters; his prose is not without a level of
omniscience.
In comparison though, Woolf delves into the minds of her characters in a way that
Cunningham cannot recreate. She does, nevertheless, utilize time in a different way than
Cunningham normally does. With Woolf, seconds can take the form of what seems like
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minutes. Her contextualization of moments is best exhibited through her work, as in the
following passage,
No, the words meant absolutely nothing to her now. She could not even
get an echo of her old emotion. But she could remember going cold with
excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy (now the old feeling
began to come back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the
dressing-table, began to do her hair), with the rooks flaunting up and down
in the pink evening light, and dressing, and going downstairs, and feeling
as she crossed the hall ‘if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most
happy.’ (Woolf 51)
Woolf has this power to take seconds and turn them into rhetorical paintings. She exhibits
a strong grasp for human emotion; Cunningham does the same, but it seems that even in
The Hours, readers are faced with a double-edged sword. Though there is a more
complex format by exploring the minds of three different women, Woolf’s singular study
allows readers to savor the moments of Clarissa Dalloway and use them to build a
continuous foundation for the development of her character. These moments allow
readers to drown themselves in Clarissa, coming to understand her as a woman and
allowing those meticulous moments to be grasped on a deeper level.
Another element that both Cunningham and Woolf explore is the concept of the
third person narrative as opposed to the first. What makes Woolf such a pioneer in the
craft of stream of consciousness is her ability to so eloquently bring her characters to life
without actually being her characters. Unlike the previous section where the narrator has
the challenge and privilege of providing each character with a voice, Woolf has restricted
54
herself to the third person narrative with much less dialogue at her disposal. By doing so,
it could be argued that the reader’s experience is possibly as strong, if not stronger, than
other perspectives. Because the voice is eliminated, authors offer up a psychological and
sociological view of the personalities and thought-process. By tackling the questions of
the human experience, as well as emotion, the subject matter being covered is ultimately
more universal. There are no dialects or class systems that draw lines in the sand between
populations. The human mind is ultimately the human mind, and humanity has been
facing the same problems for centuries on end. Woolf writes in this style, shaping our
analysis of Clarissa in a way that we would not have seen if written in her own voice. Her
forging of this literary device gave way to an entirely new perspective for many authors
leading up until today.
Likewise, Cunningham combines the unique craft of Woolf and other authors of
the early twentieth century with one of the elements discussed in the first section.
Cunningham undertakes the personas of three women, all affected by the life of Woolf’s
central character, Mrs. Dalloway. Unlike the approach of Woolf, Cunningham doesn’t
allow for a complete drowning within his characters. In comparison, Cunningham offers
more of a refreshing dip rather than a full-blown immersion into the lives of Clarissa,
Virginia, and Mrs. Brown. As previously mentioned, the author of The Hours offers an
asymmetrical parallelism among his three characters. Throughout the novel, there are a
great deal of similarities among the three women concerning sexuality, mortality, and
personal worth. However, the women being detailed never seem to have a specifically
mirrored event that is detailed in the same way as another. One of the most interesting
motifs within the novel is the question of lesbian and/or bisexual behavior. All three
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women deal with the question of sexuality in some form or fashion, but what makes the
theme so interesting is the approach Cunningham takes in regard to each character. Each
of the women seems to not only be a product of her era, but also a product of her
individual self.
Identity not only becomes a theme within The Hours, but its place within the
novel is ultimately what makes the stream of consciousness approach function properly.
Without the ability to provide a narrative voice, Cunningham establishes clear identities
for each of his characters by use of time, situation, and personality. In the Journal of
Popular Culture, Maria Lindgren Leavenworth states,
Issues connected to constructions of identity are central in all three texts
as the women question assigned and sometimes uncomfortable and painful
roles. The chapter headings in Cunningham’s novel are all markers of
identity: Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Woolf, and Mrs. Brown. Initially, they seem
uncomplicated, but the titles of Mrs. Suggest heterosexual marriages, a
suggestion which is made problematic. (Leavenworth 511)
The formation of these identities mentioned by Leavenworth is what makes The Hours
work so well. The reader has an expected title set up for these women, and as
Cunningham continues through the novel, those titles are slowly broken down. We begin
to see the value and comfort of these women deteriorate leading to eventual suicide,
homosexual interactions, and the realization of fleeting happiness. The most powerful
aspect of this degradation of sprit is that readers observe it from an observation rather
than a narrative. Cunningham’s stream of consciousness lends itself to a more devastating
read because the reader is strictly at the will of omniscient observation.
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Conversely, Woolf’s approach to the stream of consciousness is much more
intimate. Though the main focus is on Mrs. Dalloway, the characters of Mrs. Dalloway
all seem to be interconnected in a more personal way. James Schiff writes,
Second, Mrs. Dalloway is unique among city novels in the way in which
Woolf establishes a network of external and internal connections between
her urban inhabitants… Woolf's technique for managing the complexities
of urban life and for rendering that existence almost pastoral has enormous
appeal. (Schiff 364)
This effect within her novel is what makes the story of Mrs. Dalloway so compelling.
One of the greatest assets of the stream of consciousness is the liberty that it offers to the
author to make connections that would otherwise be unavailable. Woolf crafts her
characters in such a way that readers are able to observe the psychological interactions
that are “invisible” with a first person experience.
Even in our own lives, we are unable to calculate the actions and reactions of
others around us, and the motives as to why our peers act the way they do are even more
mysterious to us. However, in the world of Mrs. Dalloway, readers can understand the
reasoning behind the actions. Though the following excerpt is ambiguous in context, it
provides an excellent display of Woolf’s command over her characters and the
interconnections among them. “All this was only background for Sally. She stood by the
fireplace talking, in that beautiful voice that made everything sound like a caress, to Papa,
who had begun to be attracted rather against his will (he never got over lending her one
of his books and finding it soaked on the terrace)…” (Woolf 40). She captures the back-
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story and thoughts of her characters so effortlessly that it’s as if readers have been with
these characters long enough to experience the supporting details themselves.
Though Woolf and Cunningham take different approaches to the style of stream
of consciousness each present, it is evident that the style definitely has both its benefits
and pitfalls. The creation of a continuous stream of thought can be daunting and
sometimes even far-reaching. A true talent is necessary to create a compelling character
that retains the reader’s attention without rambling or including unnecessary detail.
Woolf’s style is a far deviation from any mistake involving unnecessary wordiness.
Woolf’s details are intentional and relevant to her characters’ development, and if
Michael Cunningham imitated anything well, it is the special attention he pays to each of
his characters and the detail that builds each of them as leading characters of The Hours.
Conclusion
I think we become slightly terrified at the idea of finding ourselves wandering
around inside the heads of other people. We’re terrified at what we may find, and even
more so, terrified about what it may reveal about ourselves. In light of that, we continue
forward, searching inside the details of our peers’ lives, and for good measure, in the
novels that take personalization to a new level. The reason that readers are so compelled
toward the first person narrative and stream of consciousness is that subconsciously, the
words flowing forth from the souls of fictional characters may just reveal something
inside of the reader that has been lingering, which begs the question: is the author
responsible for the reactions readers feel when reading these personalized pieces, or is it
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the reader that uses the words of the author as a vehicle to reveal something more
powerful inside him or herself?
Of course, it’s fair to say that sometimes the personal writing styles at hand could
be terrifying just because it’s outside the understanding of the reader. There is something
both concerning and enlightening about the nature of humanity spoken through the voices
of humans that were never real to begin with. That’s why we as readers find so much
discomfort in the tale of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” An emotion is inspired in us that can
only come from the witnessing of the event itself. Actress Susan Sarandon once said,
“Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go
unwitnessed because I will be your witness.” Novels take that quote to the next level
because in the moments that we as humans refuse to tell our deepest secrets to anyone, in
the moments that we claim to have no emotion or no stimulus to life’s triumphs, terrors,
and worries, our entire façade has already been broken down. We applaud our own
personal discovery as we watch Huck choose to sail down the river with Jim. We
rediscover our own since of pride through Minny and Aibileen, and we grieve the losses
that we had previously forgotten with every word Hannah speaks to Clay through cassette
tape. And whether we choose to recognize it or not, in the quiet moments of our lives, we
remember Mrs. Dalloway. We choose to distance ourselves from her because maybe she
is too far detached from our own time to face the questions that she causes us to query.
Then, like clockwork, she arises again in the form of Clarissa, and we’re forced to face
ourselves again and wonder, “What is it that proves our worth to the world?”
Well, that’s simple; it’s the very thing that makes the stream of consciousness and
first person narrative so powerful to begin with. We’re worthy of this world because we
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have our personal stories that will act as the legacy we leave behind to other generations.
Much like the styles in question, we develop a voice, no matter what dialect or language
it’s spoken in, and in the moments that we choose not to speak, our psyche and
mannerisms speak louder than any words we could ever speak from our mouths.
The stories that are shared with the world, whether fictional or factual, push
society forward. The strongest displays, however, are the stories that travel from the heart
and mind to the paper in the purest form possible. The first person narrative and stream of
consciousness offer the ability for those stories to be shared, and it happens to be in some
of the subtlest ways possible. Characters share the moments of their lives with such
profound honesty that the smallest of details can change the entire mood of a page. We
are products of our words. Happiness finds its way to the page in the form of an
exclamation point, sadness, through the pause of a comma.
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CHAPTER III
CREATIVE CHAPTER: FOR MEN LIKE US
Introduction
I would write an introduction for this much more formally if I believed that
anything about this creative process was formalistic. A year ago, I was planning a sixperson perspective about a school shooting staged in Carnegie Hall. I had song
inspirations for each chapter after watching an extremely moving episode of a television
show that depicted a shooting in a hospital. I was enamored with it, and the idea of
creating these people that could destroy and rebuild each other was surely going to be one
of the most entertaining pieces I could ever write. Then I watched a man die this summer;
his name was Hanin. I arrived at the swimming hole where he died and was immediately
enlisted to try to save him. Once we found him, I helped get his body to the riverbank. I
held his body in my arms. I placed him down on the orange plank that they lifted up to
the ambulance that delivered him to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. When I
began writing again, I felt sick writing a story in which people took lives and had lives
taken so cavalierly. Death is not a joke, and I could not stand the idea of using it as a
motif just for the fun of it.
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That’s how I developed the story of Jeremy. Obviously, Jeremy is somewhat of an
extension of me. In actuality, Jeremy, Evan, Dad, Momma, and Arnold are all based on
people that I’ve experienced in my life. I’ve developed all of their stories based on
experiences from my own existence. I’ve never witnessed a murder, but there’s
suddenness and shock that comes with any death that I believe is transferable. A lot of
people would say that many of the situations in my story are too particular to accurately
recreate; to that, I would say that we are the only ones responsible for limiting our human
response. We are all people, hurting in the same way over different situations. There is
nothing that Jeremy feels within these chapters that I haven’t felt as well.
Much like my research concludes in chapter one, I focus the details of my story’s
murder much less on the victim and more on the effects of what the killer has done. The
murderer’s son is the narrator after all, and I think that I give a voice to a perspective that
is very often overlooked. I’ve also enjoyed the strategies I’ve taken to make this voice
more than just a narrator giving insight to a murder. The narrator begins in a stream of
consciousness voice, shifting to the first person narrative (past-tense), then back to stream
of consciousness. I’ve found it to be an extremely challenging approach, but I believe it
has worked for the better in creating a more compelling story for the reader.
At the end of all of this, I think my biggest response to my creative section is one
similar to many of the responses I had in my thesis meetings. At times, I found it terribly
impossible to communicate in writing how powerful the stream of consciousness or a
metaphor or vivid imagery was. Many times, I told Ms. West, “I feel like I should just
write ‘read it to fully understand.’” That’s exactly how I feel about everything I’ve
written. If you want to fully understand this story and all of its characters, there’s nothing
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I could say that would help you get ready for them. I think the best thing you can do is
read it for all that it’s worth and come to your own conclusions. This isn’t my story
anymore; it’s yours.
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For Men Like Us
Justin Kirkland
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Prologue
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known
suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These
persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them
with compassions, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just
happen.”—Elizabeth Kubler Ross
I found that quote yesterday and quickly wrote it down on a Post-it and stuck it in
my back pocket, one of just a couple of things that I keep back there. I’ve always
struggled defining what beauty is, and I sure would have never placed myself in that
category. Not for a moment. If you had told me that I was beautiful a couple of years ago,
I would have quickly corrected you. Men are not beautiful; men are handsome. At one
point in my life, there were words for women and words for men. But as I sit here in the
courthouse today looking around, I struggle to define exactly who is a man and who is a
woman. The idea of gender and race and all these other things has become irrelevant.
Beauty is not found within the gender or any other external aspect of our bodies. Beauty
is something that may even be beyond human reach. We may only be so lucky to ever
experience what true beauty is.
I’ve struggled with a lot in the past year, and somehow, my life has never been
clearer than it is right now. As a Political Science major, I used to like to believe I had an
understanding of people and the way that they work in a communal sense. I thought of
my major as “Sociology for Gain.” That goes back to high school and maybe even middle
school. I’d always been comfortable being at the top of the hierarchical chain. The details
of that chain are sort of like the presidency. There’s something special about the person
that gets to the top, but it’s hard sometimes to pick out the exact quality that sets them
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apart from everyone else. I think along the way, I had an understanding for what people
expected out of me and what it was exactly that they wanted to see me do. I’ve always
been good at meeting the expectations of others and acting as they needed me to. That’s
not enough though. Being a thinly veiled figurehead is no sign of a leader, nor is it one of
beauty.
I have learned over the past couple years, last year in particular, that this chain of
command is fragile. In terms of democracy, a President is nothing without his people.
Look at President Obama. He’s this man for change and empowering the young voters
and whatnot, but like many presidencies of the past, he’s lost that zip, the charm. Without
that spark that inspired so many people, he’s lost his people, and when you’ve lost your
people, you’ve lost your power. You’re back to you, and that’s when the beauty becomes
more important than ever. In a year’s time, a time that has been increasingly more and
more complicated, I have found that a president must understand the concept of beauty as
described by Elizabeth Kubler Ross. That beauty must be awarded accordingly, and in a
way, a president must be beautiful himself. Today, I will be playing president. I will be
forced to choose a side of life to represent, and that choice has the potential to affect more
lives than I will ever be able to fully understand. I have lived what it’s like to lose your
people, to be forced into a corner, and to step out of that corner with an understanding
that no corner was ever right to begin with.
I do know which side I will choose though. Through the course of four months,
Patrick, Evan, Momma, and Dad have helped me to fully understand beauty, and even
more so, they have helped me to find beauty within myself. Beauty is a gender-neutral
word, and if when you think of the word beauty your mind gravitates toward physical
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appearance, then I look forward to the day that we can share in a common definition.
Beauty is produced from our struggles, watered with the tears we cry and warmed by the
brief moments of laughter that help bandage our wounds.
I never imagined that I would ever testify at a murder trial, let alone one that my
dad was a suspect in, but I guess crazier things have happened. For the longest time I was
worried how I would ever manage to do it. What if all of the details got blurry? What if
there was something that I said that could be misconstrued as something that could
change the outcome of the entire trial? How would I ever be able to face myself if I didn’t
do this as accurately as possible? As I got ready this morning though, preparing to meet
Dad here at the courthouse, the simplest of all revelations hit me: just tell the truth. If
beauty is engrained in anything, the truth is where you can most readily find it. But I
suppose all of this seems a little vague in context. I can promise at least one thing about
today though; my testimony will be the truth, the only truth, and nothing but the truth, so
help me God. No opinions or ambiguities have a place in the courtroom, only truth.
Maybe this will all make a little more sense if I just tell you the story.
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“Death is at your doorstep; it will steal your innocence but will not
steal your substance.”- Mumford and Sons
Have you ever watched yourself die? It’s terrifying. Nauseating, even. It’s one of
the most beautifully grotesque things I think I’ve ever witnessed in my life. That moment
could possibly be one of the grandest out of body experiences I think a human can have,
and I don’t mean that in the literal sense of watching your body cease to function; it’s as
if your spirit has become so devastated that your body has no reason to carry on. No
matter how sickened or overwhelmed you feel, there’s no hand you can offer or solution
to present. Standing and watching it happen, no matter how menial it may seem, is the
only thing you are able to do. You just sort of wait quietly, and your breaths grow shorter
and shorter until you realize that if you don’t start breathing again, you may actually die.
There’s a brief moment of panic, and then, at least for me, your entire mind shuts down.
And the drive home is the longest one you’ll ever take.
But I suppose that all of that is pretty confusing because I’m very much alive. I
still walk around and talk to people. I feel pain and exhaustion and pleasure; there is
nothing about me that is celestial or ghostly, or these days, holy. In the literature class I
had to take my sophomore year of college, we intently studied rhetoric and language,
plot, and all these other elements that made words on a page suddenly transform into
literature. I, however, didn’t care so much about all of that as much as the back-story.
There was never enough of a background for me to really understand all of the characters
that I had been reading about. I needed history and concrete facts, and it wasn’t until I
wanted to tell this story, from start to finish, that I realized that maybe the background
information is somewhat unnecessary. Aren’t we a living display of our life’s stories
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through the actions that we make every day? It’s every memory, hope, and tragedy that
contributes to the people that we have somehow become, and we can only hope that the
small remnants of our history have the ability to save us from the monsters that our future
could make us.
My cell phone was alarmingly loud the night that this all started; I remember
because I nearly had a heart attack as Adele echoed out of the curiously small speakers on
my phone. Maybe it was because I was drowning in the midst of the USA PATRIOT Act
term paper I was writing for Public Policy or maybe it just seemed that loud because it
kick-started a really definitive story, my own piece of literature. The details seem
ridiculously crisp, sort of like the way everyone knows their exact actions leading up to
September 11th. I grabbed the phone off the desk, not even noticing who the call was
from or the fact that it was well past the time in the night that anyone should be making a
phone call. I also didn’t recognize the voice on the other end; I thought to myself, “It
must be Jeff.”
Jeff is the name that I gave to any of the people that called me on behalf of my
dad when it was time to pick him up from the bar. I do want to say though, my dad is not
an alcoholic by nature; he’s an alcoholic by circumstance. Dad rarely ever drank before
Momma died, maybe a beer while he was cooking or something, but nothing more than
that. I suppose that’s no excuse for his actions, but I can’t really say what I would do if
the person I shared worries and breakfast and a bed with suddenly became a mirage. I, of
course, immersed myself in college and dorm life. I made it a point not to go home, but
for him, he had a workday. At the end of that, he would return home to the freshest
leftovers in the fridge, our worn loveseat, and HBO. After months of me not coming
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home, we would start to meet at the bars close to campus. That worked fine for a while.
Then class would pick up, and he would go to all of those places alone, picking up Jeffs
along the way.
When I got off the phone with Jeff, I noticed that my laptop had gone to sleep. I
remember staring at my reflection in the darkness of the screen, and even in a black
fingerprinted mirror, I could see how tired I was getting. Nothing about the situation was
opportune, but it felt really late that night. One of those nights that you can feel your
contacts drying out, as if they’re begging your eyelids to blink just so you can get a
millisecond of sleep. I pushed back away from the desk and wiped the sleep from my
eyes, leaving the small pebbles on my pant legs as I searched the desk for my keys. It felt
like another inconvenient phone call to pick Dad up, get him home, not wreck on the way
back to the dorm, followed by one last burst of energy to throw myself into bed. There
was even a comfort in the routine of it all, even the three pocket check as I opened up the
door to my room. Phone. Wallet. Keys. Let’s go.
My Jeep is my sanctuary; I’ve had it for almost six years now, and it looks as new
as I’m sure it did back in 1988 when it first hit the lot, provided that it had all the faded
sunspots and a sagging headliner. Regardless, it’s my safest place in the world, and the
best part about it is that it traveled to wherever I needed it to be. Since I started college,
I’m pretty sure my Jeep has seen more of my life than anyone else has. He’s my friend,
my one companion that would never abandon me. And we’ve had all these talks on the
way home; I imagine that underneath the very vintage blue and gray plaid seat fabric lays
a book full of words that I’ve said in anger and excitement and infatuation. In the
moments that I don’t have anything to say, he offers me an assortment of buttons. The
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perfect song always seems to blare forth, as if he controls the radio and the next song that
will play. He protects me, and he’s the only person I would have trusted to be there with
me that night.
As I pulled up to the bar, I scanned the parking lot for Dad. There he was,
standing over next to the entrance with Jeff and Jeff and Jeff. He immediately recognized
the Jeep, throwing up his hand as I started getting out. As I got over to him, the smell hit
me like a rock. I probably could have put a tap on him and served people as they were
walking in. I thought Why did you let him go this far before calling? Dad grabbed me
around the chest, screaming in my ear, “Jeremy! Where have you been; I haven’t seen
you in months!” He had seen me the day before. “We have so much to talk about!” He
gave me a kiss on the neck as I winked at Jeff and nodded for him and the others to head
on out. We had always been a really loving family, but I didn’t notice until Dad started
drinking on a regular basis that he would take loving to that uncomfortable Italian family
level that you see in movies. He put his arm around my shoulder and drew in real close;
he ducked his head down and looked at me with the stare. I’m sure you know what the
stare is; it’s that level of intoxication when you use your top eyelids to distinguish where
someone is. I knew it well; we’ve all seen the stare at some point in our lives, and some
of us ashamedly have given that stare to at least a couple other people.
“I gotta tell you about my night.”
“Well, let’s hop in the car and you can tell me on the way home,” I responded.
“Nah, man, we gotta go back inside and grab a beer and talk about it. It’s a long story,”
he pleaded, “c’mon, you haven’t came out like we used to in forever.”
I sighed, using my breath to push away the haze of Miller Light surrounding my face.
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“Do you want to do my term paper, Dad? Tell me about the USA PATRIOT Act.
Tell me everything you know.”
He started laughing. He kept exchanging glances with the door, then back to me, then
back at the door before finally conceding and walking toward the Jeep with me.
I hate regretting things, or rather, I hate retrospect. Momma made me that way.
She would debate, usually with herself, for at least a half an hour when we would leave
the house because she was convinced she left the oven on. I never remember her ever
using the oven before we’d go to Wal-Mart or out to eat, but she was always convinced
that something was in there: a random casserole, leftovers, an oven mitt, our cat. Always
something. So for years, I slowly became obsessed with the door locks, my own oven,
where my keys were… anything that might give me a reason to be paranoid. So the idea
of when I left my dorm room has haunted me for months. We as humans have this
superman complex, as if we have a ridiculous free reign over our lives that dictates every
occurrence that could ever happen. I suppose I also had a say when Patrick Campbell
walked out of the bar that night. At least I feel like I do.
Patrick was a tall man, built. At first glance, you just wouldn’t screw around with
somebody as big as Patrick. Then you see his face; in the moment that I caught it in the
light of the streetlamp, I felt oddly compelled to memorize it. Some people just have
sweet faces. He was clean-shaven, with softer features than most men. He didn’t look like
an angry kind of person; he was just an attractive young guy, couldn’t have been much
older than me. I looked over at him and nodded. He smiled back and nodded as his
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blonde hair reflected the light of the streetlamp. He was caught in an orange glow for just
long enough to catch your attention.
“That’s that faggot that’s been hitting on me all night,” Dad whispered. My entire
body tightened up. I hate that word; I’ve always hated that word. In a world of fucks and
shits and damns, that word just doesn’t even sound appropriate. It’s like a two-syllable
punch invented to reach out and smack you across the face. Watch someone say it some
time; your teeth bite down on your lip as anger surges to the front of your face. Your nose
snarls ever so slightly as you release the “f” echoed by the harsh “g” that relieves your
face to a point of self-entitled pride. People who say faggot feel like they’re doing
something, like you’ve proven yourself a superior race.
“Jeremy, look at that faggot.”
Patrick turned around.
“Yeah, faggot! You heard me. Get the fuck out of here.”
And it was hard growing up not to fall into the same line of thought. I found it
easy to identify the downfalls of the guys at my high school that may or may not have
been gay. We were taught at a young age to identify those who were inferior to us. We
capitalized on their supposed shortcomings and forced them into the roles that we needed
them to play. I was expected to play soccer; they were expected to play queers. Then
Momma died. When someone dies, it exposes your nerves to things you never expected
to face. People were no longer chess pieces. It was my friend Arnold, an openly gay man,
who helped me through Momma’s death in the moments that no one else cared to knock
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on the door that echoed cries of a downtrodden soccer player. When he put his arms
around me, I didn’t feel the embrace of a gay man; I felt the arms of another human.
Patrick retorted, “Fuck you, man,” throwing his arm in the air. I closed my eyes,
grabbing Dad’s arm just long enough for him to jerk it away.
“This is what I was talking about; no self-respect to leave a straight man be.” Dad
stormed toward him, “What’d you say faggot?”
I flinched again. Patrick, however, did not. “Dude, I never tried to cause you any—”
Of course Dad cut him off. A slew of phrases and threats ensued; it was a wave of
incoherencies: a faggot here, a queer there, laced together with drunken verbiage that
implied a possible situation that probably never happened.
“Listen, I wouldn’t hit on a prejudice bigot like yourself if you were the only one in the
bar.”
Thud. I swear I could hear the echo of the punch from five feet away. Patrick
buckled, shuffling backward toward his car, parked conveniently beside Dad’s truck. Dad
approached him again, fists wadded up so tightly that his fingers could have forged
together. Patrick stood back up, blocking his face. His sweet face. A face that couldn’t
even be capable of saying faggot. Dad swung again, connecting with Patrick’s arms
followed by a right hook landed right on his jaw. I felt myself move forward, reaching
out for Dad’s fist. He swung around nearly hitting me in the process. He looked at me
with these eyes, as if Patrick and I were one in the same, so I stood there, waiting for the
next hit. Patrick crumbled next to the truck, and if that wasn’t enough, Dad kicked him in
the ribs. “Who you hittin’ on now?”
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I felt sick. Tears were burning hot trails down my face, begging for an escape
from my welling eyes. Kick, after kick, after kick, and I stood there. Silent.
All of that night was hearsay. This story: hearsay. Our lives are nothing but chains
of hearsay following hearsay. We make all of these assumptions that we have decreed to
be true because to us, they are. Our interpretations and misconceptions form into words
and punches and kicks. Patrick was laying there, a tangled mess of arms and legs with
just a small line of blood trickling from his nose. The night made it look like tar, reflected
off his pale face. He opened his eyes and looked up at me. I couldn’t bear to look at him,
but I couldn’t bear to take my eyes away. Dad glanced back at me, recognizing that
Patrick was staring at me. He could see the tears falling from my face, catching an ounce
of the orange light encased inside. Patrick begged through a cracked voice, “Please.” I
felt a gulp of air enter my lungs, as I took in a broken inhale. Dad kicked him again. Such
a courteous plea to stop such a discourteous action. Patrick moaned quietly next to the
truck, reaching upward toward the tire to try and pull himself upright.
And then it happened. Dad reared back one last time. He looked like he was about
to kick a field goal; his steel-toed boot connected instantly with Patrick’s head. I watched
his head bounce off the tire and fall to the pavement. There was no motion, no cries. He
didn’t even look real, just a mess of something that had found its place next to the truck
because someone had assumed a story that may have never happened.
“He’s done! He’s done!” I cried to Dad, “Please. Jesus, he’s done.” Not a single
person was in the parking lot. Not a single person came out from the bar when the
screaming started. Isn’t that why there are bouncers? Shouldn’t someone have walked out
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the door to leave and called the police? Patrick lay there at the base of the truck,
motionless. The swelling had already started, and I couldn’t take it. “Are you happy with
yourself?”
Dad looked at me, wiping his mouth with his jacket sleeve, “Fuck him.”
He started walking toward my Jeep, but I couldn’t move. I could feel the tears
beginning to dry as the warm wind blew out the summertime from between the fall trees.
I stood next to Patrick and just stared. I tried to think about all the people that I had hated
most in the world; all of the people that made me truly loathe their existence, and even in
that moment, I could never imagine attacking them. I was frozen there, unable to do
anything. If I were a man, I would have stopped it. I would have taken the hit and pissed
off my drunk dad. If I had done anything else, it would have been better than just
standing there, mildly interjecting with concern and tears. I leaned down to Patrick, his
face nearly as empty of expression as my entire body felt.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
I felt all of the blood rush out of my head as soon as I said it. Fifteen minutes
before, he was such a huge guy. Patrick was this enormous man that was walking out of a
bar around the same time as a man who hated him for no reason. I tilted my head, just
slightly taking what would be a final look at his face. The car door opening behind jarred
me. “You coming?”
He sounded like we were leaving the store or something, as if I was searching my
bags for something that I thought I had lost. This wasn’t a grocery store run or a hurried
picnic. I didn’t even know if Patrick was still breathing; hell, I wasn’t sure if I was still
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breathing. I stood up beside Patrick and looked behind at Dad getting into the Jeep. I
looked back down at the whole situation, laying right there before me. I wanted to change
it all; I wanted to call an ambulance or the cops or Momma. I wanted to just throw up.
But I didn’t; I walked to the Jeep and got in. I could see Dad breathing heavily beside me.
He opened his mouth, “You know wha—”
“Stop.”
“What?”
“I said stop. Just, don’t.”
He sat back in his seat, and I backed out of the parking lot. He would try to talk to
me on the way home about why he did what he did the more he sobered up. I would
interrupt him along the way with a simple please, the same word that Patrick had used to
try and get him to stop before. After awhile, he quit speaking entirely. He must have
known that it was too much, too soon. All of it was too much on the way home. Even
Jeep didn’t have anything to say; I turned the radio off, and the entire drive home was in
silence. We pulled up the driveway, and I put the car into park. “We really should talk
about this,” he muttered, as if he was a child that said the wrong thing or something. I
turned the ignition off and sat there hollow. “I did what I did for men like us, Jeremy.”
“Don’t tell me about men like us. Don’t act like we’re the same right now.”
“Jeremy, that man was coming at m—”
“Just go inside. Go inside and go to sleep.”
“Jeremy, you can’t tell anyone about this. You can’t mention a word of what happened to
anyone. Not your friends, not your best friend, not God. Promise me.” I stared out the
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window, swallowing the knot in my throat just long enough to say, “I promise. Please, go
inside.”
He opened up the door, and that was it. I backed out of the driveway and
proceeded back to my dorm. I had stopped crying back at the bar, but I couldn’t shake the
nausea. It lay inside my stomach like poison with no way out. All it could do was settle
and wait until it killed me or pushed me to throwing up. I rolled down the window,
hoping that a hint of cool autumn air would ease it, but as soon as I passed the first set of
headlights on the road, it had become too much. All of my senses were more on point
than they had ever been, and it was as if one sound too loud or one light too bright would
send me over the edge. I swerved to the shoulder of the road, opened my door, and threw
up all over the pavement, and when my stomach was empty, I continued to heave. I could
almost feel the vessels in my eyes begin to burst, and I could have sworn if I had thrown
up any harder, my heart would have come up out of my chest. When I finished, I closed
the door, breathed in a deep inhale, and pulled back onto the road.
I didn’t know Patrick’s name until later on, when I saw his picture on the news.
He died that night, internal bleeding I suppose. It might have even been the kick to head.
I could never bring myself to watch the news reports long enough to find out. The picture
they used for him was perfect. He was so happy. Alive and smiling and happy. He was
twenty-three, two years older than me. The picture made him perfect, and if I could
change the channel quickly enough, I could be happy knowing that for that moment he
was on the news, he was still alive. He was one of the best people I never knew in my
life. I would study that picture in my mind and use it to desperately extinguish all of the
horrible images that I had witnessed in person. His blonde hair stopped right above his
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kind eyes. You know what I mean when I say kind eyes: the kind of eyes that lets you
know that you could trust someone, the kind that lets you talk first and take the last piece
of cake and holds the door open for you. But Patrick was gone now. He died out there
next to Dad’s truck or at the hospital or maybe even in transit. It didn’t matter where he
died, it mattered how he died, and I might have well been the one to do it, and I hate
myself for that so much.
As I pulled into the parking lot at school and pulled my key out of the ignition, the
clock flashed 3:43. I reached around, massaging my neck, realizing that in the midst of all
of this, there was a life to be lived after all of it, whether I understood how I should live it
or not. I walked in and put the key into my room, dropped them on the desk next to the
laptop and term paper that I had left before. Everything seemed so normal at the time, as
if the past two hours had never happened. I brushed my teeth and turned down my bed. I
checked my phone alarm at least three times making sure that I wouldn’t oversleep for
the next morning’s classes. I turned off the lamps, closed the blinds, and took off my
clothes to get into bed. It was normal; I was normal.
I have a playlist of songs I play every night before I go to sleep. It’s the same set
over and over to the point that it had all become white noise as far as I was concerned.
Just a handful of songs that was quiet. I pulled the covers up over me, grabbing the pillow
that I always pull near to me. It was extra cool on my chest that night, as if it was there to
slow my heart down… as if it was supposed to make me feel something, even if it was
just the coolness. I pressed play on the laptop and laid my head down. Mumford and Sons
whispered throughout the room. Death is at your doorstep. It will steal your innocence,
but will not steal your substance. I began to breathe faster and faster, pulling the pillow
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against me as hard as I could. I could feel the tears falling onto the pillow. Drip. Each of
them leaving small stains on the light blue pillowcase. Drip. I left Patrick laying in the
parking lot, and I prayed that every siren I heard that night was on its way to him. Drip.
And all I did that night was lay there and stare at the wall, waiting on some miracle that
might save him or me or the idea that something like that could ever happen.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
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“So tell me when you hear my heart stop; you’re the only one that knows.
Tell me when you hear my silence; there’s a possibility, I wouldn’t know.”- Lykke Li
I couldn’t bring myself to even knock on Evan’s door, so for the longest time, I
just sort of sat outside his apartment. Just sat there, contemplating what my next step
would be. I wouldn’t let him near me for weeks after the murder. Not a hug or a kiss or
even a phone call. I couldn’t quite fathom how you were supposed to tell your boyfriend
that you watched a man get murdered based strictly off of his sexuality when he was the
first man you were ever involved with. Evan and I came out around the same time, and
after that, we happened out of nowhere. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of my friends come out
and just cling to the first person they find. That’s what you do in small-college-townGeorgia. You pounce on your first available option, and you make it work because
pickings are particularly slim. But that’s not how it happened with Evan and me. It
always made a lot of sense that we ended up together.
When we first told some of our friends about our sexuality, I needed Evan, and in
a way, I think he needed me too. There’s this common idea that you change who you are
when you come out, as if your pail of glitter and Glee box set is waiting on the table right
outside of the closet. I never really thought that was fair, so I went through a pretty
intense period of verbally accosting people while Evan would pull me away and calm me
down. He has always been the eye of my hurricane, the calm that eventually settles the
storm. I think that’s what scared me most about telling him about what happened. I’ve
never understood being levelheaded, and I had an even harder time figuring out what
happens when the head isn’t so level anymore. So instead, I just popped a squat outside
of his apartment and played on my cell phone until it died.
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Evan is the same age as Patrick was, twenty-three. I met him back at the end of
freshman year when Arnold introduced him and me. I’m pretty sure at first he thought I
was obnoxious, even though he tells me that wasn’t the case at all. I thought he was
uptight and shy, and I’ve told him that story a thousand times. There was a certain
security coming out with Evan though. We had a year together on campus to be with each
other all of the time, and we tested our endurance by being away from each other once he
had graduated. For the longest time, that apartment was my sanctuary. I would go there to
escape everything from school, but as senior year has started up and all of this happened,
I hadn’t been able to stay here for more than a couple minutes without busting out of my
body. What made this even harder is that Evan thought it was just the rigors of senior
year; he’d been through it all before. I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer.
Eventually, I had to get up. It made me sick because I had been harboring this for
weeks now, and Evan was getting worried. Knock. Oh shit. Knock, knock. Why did I do
that? It felt like when you get on a roller coaster and you hear the seats lock; there’s no
getting off, but the difference was that I was sitting on the roller coaster by myself, and at
the end of the roller coaster, no one would be there. That’s how I felt at least. Nothing
had ever come between us, not like this. After dating two years, we had become settled
into the idea of arguing to make up. I would get mad for simple things, and he would be
mad for about two hours, and then it would be over. Our relationship is healthy. We
always would spend time apart because we wanted to be our own people, separate from
each other. If a decision was to be made, it was made together with give and take on
either side, and he gladly supported me when I asked to keep our relationship secret from
my family. I’ve always lived in Georgia; I knew what it meant to be from a place where
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that just wasn’t tolerated. His respect of that makes him one of the greatest people that
I’ve ever known.
The door opened, and there he stood. “Hey you. I didn’t expect for you to be dropping
by.” Yes, an escape plan.
“I mean, I can leave or come back or something. I should have called.” I turned away
from the door and started to walk away. Freedom. Secrecy. Yes. “Hey! Where are you
going? You know you’re always welcome here. You haven’t stayed around here for more
than a drop by and leave kind of deal.” Damn. He grabbed me around the waist and
kissed me on the cheek, unable to notice that all the blood from my head had dropped
down to my feet.
I stood there for a second, frozen, thinking that maybe if I jumped hard enough
that the building would collapse swallowing me whole. Sadly, jumping would only
prolong the process, just a moment in the air and then back down to Earth again. Evan
has always been terribly efficient when it came to hospitality, as if he was trained at a
young age how to host people in his residence. I found a seat on his old green couch next
to his cat, Baxter. Without asking, he grabbed a Coke from the fridge, sat it down,
plopped down beside me and turned on the television. “You haven’t been by in awhile,”
he leaned up against me, kicking his feet up on the arm of the couch, “Glad you’re here,”
grabbing my hand for a quick squeeze. He squirmed around, trying to find that
comfortable spot in my tricep that is the perfect place for a head to rest. I looked over at
Baxter, as if he had some sort of answer to offer. I still believe to this day that Baxter
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knew what was coming, some kind of animal instinct or something. Baxter nuzzled his
head between my back and the couch as if to say, “Hey man, I got your back.”
Evan turned his head up to me, “You seem tense.” Yeah, you could say that. The
knot in my throat put the knot in my bicep to shame. Evan had music playing before I
came in, and I did everything I could to focus on it. The music was the only thing that
could keep my mind together enough so that I didn’t blurt everything out. Ray
Lamontagne whispered, “Oh lover, don’t you roam. Now I’m fighting words I never
thought I’d say.” I hate and love music and the way it identifies me. I feel like these
musicians locate me and have some sort of omnipotence to narrate my life in the most
beautiful of words, no matter how heartbreaking they may be for me to hear. Evan moved
closer and closer, finally turning toward me for a kiss. I thought to myself, “No, this
would just make the fall harder. This is not the set up that needs to happen. This is only
going to make it more difficult to say it all without tears and emotions and regret. I can’t
let—” Then it all sort of happened. I can’t really begin to describe it. There’s your pop
kisses, and then there’s your make out kisses. Every time I think back to the moment, it’s
best described as one of those perfect kisses. He leaned in as if he were going to give me
a pop kiss and suddenly remembered that he missed me. He lingered. That’s the best way
to describe it: a linger.
To this day, that kiss was one of the simplest, most intimate moments I’ve ever
shared with another person in my life. He reached up, touching my face gently, patiently
running his fingers along my jaw line until he ran out of skin to caress. I had seen Evan
plenty of times in the past couple weeks, but this was the first contact we had like this in
forever. Skin hunger. I read about it once in a psychology class I took; skin hunger is this
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idea that you need a certain amount of contact to survive. And now that thirst was
quenched with just a drop of water. That kiss was the fleeting hallucination of a dream
that you so desperately desire to recreate once you have awakened. It was a perfect
moment, but it was only a moment.
I pulled away, “Evan, did you see the man on the news?”
“What man?” he responded, bewildered that I was bringing up someone from the news in
a moment like that.
“The man that was killed here while back; they thought it was a hate crime because he
was gay.”
Evan sat up on the couch, realizing that our moment had passed. I instantly
regretted ever bringing it up; I was caught in flux. It was too late to return back to the
kiss. It was too late to blow off the fact that I brought up the random man from the news
that actually wasn’t so random at all. Evan approaches most things very objectively; even
our relationship was somewhat calculated. The snuggling, the kissing, the sex. It all came
with due time, very specific due time that made logical sense. I, on the other hand, would
have knocked everything out in a month’s time if I were permitted to. So, it was a
surprise to me that my initial statement didn’t yield a string of questions.
“Yeah, what about him?”
“I mean, I guess it’s less about him and more about the person who did it. Do you think
someone really meant to do all of that out of hate?” Wow, Jeremy. Fantastic question.
He responded in such a cavalier manner, “People do it all the time, Jeremy.” He reached
for the remote changing channels back in forth between Food Network and some trivial
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reality show. I couldn’t decide at that point if I wanted him to keep ignoring the matter or
if I wanted him to dig deeper. I felt like he didn’t care about what I was talking about,
and that frustrated me more than anything. We were supposed to know each other; he
picked up that I was tense. He had obviously seen me pull away from the best kiss that
has ever existed. And still, in all of that, he wouldn’t pursue the stimulus that produced
the response.
So, I sat there just long enough that any more mention of the man from the news
would be more out of place than I felt sitting on that couch. The topic was lingering in the
air like death, waiting for me to grab it and bring it to life. I felt it bubble up from my
lungs like tar, the same tar I saw the night Patrick died. The murder had become this
grandiose secret that was tearing everything apart: me, us, my entire life. I was convinced
that if I could just tell one person, that some kind of weight would be lifted off of my
shoulders. I wanted that night to be less my fault than it was, and I was convinced that
one person was able to change that for me. That person had to be Evan.
“I saw it happen.”
I lifted my head upward to make eye contact with him. I could read every shocked
response that illuminated Evan’s face, “What do you mean you saw it happen?”
“I mean, I saw Patrick get killed that night.” That was the first time that I had ever said
Patrick’s name out loud to anyone other than myself. I expected that everything would
suddenly come rushing back, all of these feelings and images that had become so
engrained in my head, but for some reason it all just became really numb, as if the notion
of telling someone really did relieve some of the pressure.
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I can’t remember who it was that said it, I was never much of a science person,
but for every action, there’s apparently an equal and opposite reaction. I was quickly
reminded of that when I remembered what I had just said. Evan was speechless, which
was weird. I mean, he’s not the biggest talker ever but he’s always had some sort of
response. He rubbed his head and looked at me, “I understand what’s been going on now.
I’m so sorry.” He understood everything that was going on. Evan understood all of the
pain I was going through and the monster that had been eating me up inside for the past
three weeks, sort of. “Do you remember what the guy looked like?” That’s the sort of
part.
“It’s more complicated than that.”
Then the Evan that I knew started to come out, “I know it’s hard to remember, but
you have—” And that’s what’s so sweet about him. He believes that every question can
be answered with a logical process. I had to cut him off; telling him the entire story was
more important than anything at this point, no matter what would happen.
“My dad did it.”
When you drop a bomb like that, you expect someone to be sort of shocked. I
know I probably would be; what am I saying? I was shocked. I was frozen as it all
happened, and I didn’t know what to say even if I had wanted to speak. Evan
immediately got up from the couch though and disappeared into the kitchen. I sat there
with Baxter, frozen to the couch. You know the cold feeling you get as a kid when
you’ve done something wrong? The feeling starts in your chest and spiderwebs out
toward your limbs, making you wonder if you’re about to shit on yourself or pass out or
completely convulse. That’s the feeling that I had. I rubbed my face, trying to get some
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amount of blood to travel back toward the top of my body. I often wondered if I was
selfish for telling him. Evan never saw it coming at all, and when I told him, he
disappeared in the kitchen. I couldn’t see what he was doing or saying, and I don’t think I
really would have wanted to, so I sat there with Baxter exchanging looks every once in a
while. Evan came back around the corner from the kitchen.
“Jesus Christ, Jeremy.” Yeah, I’ve said that a couple times to myself as well. He
pushed back his rich brown hair, exposing his bright green eyes that were staring a hole
through the wall. I don’t think he could bring himself to look at me, and I don’t think I
really blame him for that. “You have to tell the police; you know that, right?” His voice
was suddenly calm, not a hint of frantic panic or fear.
“Evan, I don’t think I can.”
“You can’t sit there and tell me that you can justify the actions of a narrow-minded
murderer.”
That was the first time in the entire process that I started pointed fingers at other
people. I had this nice life, this nice piece of paper. Sure, I was busy; I’ve always been a
busy person but I’ve loved my life a lot. It was a real nice piece of paper, until everyone
came along to destroy it. Dad killed Patrick, and then it was perforated. At the time, it
seemed like Evan hated me, and he hated my dad even more, so he looked at my life, at
my paper, and he ripped it. What hurt me the most is when I realized that Momma was
responsible for creating the whole sheet of paper. Evan would have never turned this on
me if Dad hadn’t killed Patrick. Dad would have never killed Patrick if he hadn’t been
drinking. Dad would have never been drinking if Momma hadn’t died, and Momma
wouldn’t have died if God hadn’t have given her cancer. Hatred is the most powerful
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source of deterioration that has ever existed in the world. Love is the second. Both have
worked on me since the day it happened, but if I had to choose a climax to the entire
situation, it probably would have been telling Evan. And in the midst of it all, the hatred
and the love, I responded in a way that even I never imagined I would.
“Okay, you want me to turn in my dad for murder? That’s awfully easy for you to say.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean you never had to hide anything from your parents. They loved you from
the moment you said homosexual. Of course your dad wouldn’t kill a man because of his
sexuality either. Do you not think this has eaten away at me for weeks? Don’t you think
that I’ve wanted to say something, Evan?” I was becoming flustered. “I didn’t come to
you looking for legal advice. I came here because I needed you.”
“And I’ve given you everything you’ve ever needed.” Whoa. “You think I wanted
my first boyfriend to be someone who couldn’t take me home to meet his parents? Don’t
you ever think that it bothered me that a future with you would be me making you choose
between your family and me? I want to give you my world, and sometimes it seems like
you run around with it like it’s something I hand out to everyone. You claim to be in this
for the good and the bad as long as it doesn’t cross the front door of your house. And
even if it worked out, I would always wonder across the dinner table if your dad was
going to use his knife to cut his steak or me.”
I shut down. I really couldn’t think of anything else that I even wanted to say. I
felt like I made a mistake, and now, I had this numbness. On top of it all, it felt like the
safest option out of anyone to tell was suddenly the last person that ever wanted to hear
it; if you can’t tell the person you care most about and trust them, who could you tell? I
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was abandoned there as he stood over me looking me over as if I was someone he never
really knew. The room was silent, as the song playing through our exchange had come to
a close. No matter how mad I was, I look back on it now, and I always hoped he would
say something else, just something that let me know that he would try to understand. All I
wanted was a simple, I love you. But that didn’t happen; instead, he turned and went back
into the kitchen, and I watched his tall but strong build disappear behind the wall of
pictures that separated the living room from where I wasn’t. I had studied that wall a
thousand times before, noticing each person and their placement. We were in the middle
of the entire wall. Our picture was just a small 4x6 shot of me leaning over and kissing
him on the cheek. Simple.
Looking at that picture, amassed among all of the other larger, more important
ones made me realize something that hurt worse than anything I could ever bear to say to
Evan. He was completely right. The limitations I had set for our relationship benefited
me, and I did it out of fear. I wasn’t able to be for him what he deserved, and I think
realizing that affirmed that I loved him more than I would ever be able to tell him. I
couldn’t do any of that for him, not then. One of Evan’s favorite songs was playing in the
background, “So tell me when you hear my heart stop; you’re the only one that knows.
Tell me when you hear my silence; there’s a possibility, I wouldn’t know.” There wasn’t a
lot left for me to say in the matter. I even find myself for a loss of words when looking
back on it. I think it’s probably one of those moments you feel more than anything. A
certain peace comes with all the melancholy. Then you float on it, this sea of sadness that
has suddenly presented itself in front of you. You don’t drown; you don’t let yourself do
that. An understanding reveals itself while you’re floating, and it’s only there that you
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can look up toward the heavens and start to collect all of the things that have placed you
in that sea to begin with.
I moved back to my seat on the couch; Baxter had jumped off at some point and
sneaked past me into the kitchen to see where Evan was. I sat there, as the hum of the
music was the only audible noise in the entire apartment. I had stopped listening to what
the words were saying. Each of the songs seemed to be entirely too honest for my liking.
I didn’t need to listen to the music anymore; everything that needed to be said had been
stated. At that point, I was just waiting on what would come next. I never expected for it
to be an outstanding outcome, even though I had hoped that the conversation would lead
to one. All I could do was wait.
Evan came through grabbing his jacket from the closet.
“Where are you going?”
“Out. I need time to process all of this.”
“Evan, I’m so sorry. I just don’t know if I can do what you want me to do. I can’t stand
the idea of you hating me though.”
“Jeremy, I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. Hate is what caused all of this; hate is
something that pushes us back farther than we ever started in life, and I don’t want you to
do anything because I asked you to. I would hope that you would need to tell someone.
You’ve got to know that by keeping this a secret, you’re doing an injustice to thousands
of people that have put their necks out for people like you and me. That’s what I can’t
understand. This could all be you tomorrow, Jeremy, and the person that did it could be
someone else’s father. This is bigger than family. These are people; real people that live
and breathe just to get by every day. I don’t think I could live with the idea of witnessing
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it, and not saying something to justify it.”
I took a minute to listen to everything he had to say; you know, really listen. He started to
walk out the door. I stopped him, “I really do love you, Evan.”
“I know.”
The door closed. I sat by myself in his apartment for at least another hour thinking
about it all. The room was alive with reminders of Evan and me, and it burned every time
I considered keeping everything a secret. And I find it funny because even leading up to
now, I never worried about Evan telling anyone. I don’t think he ever saw it as his burden
to bear. Not in the same way that I had to bear it at least. I had no idea when Evan would
come back, and I felt like when he did, he needed to be alone. In his space. Just some
solitary time to think. I had taken three weeks to process it all before I could even fathom
telling anyone else, so I left. I picked up my Coke can, and I threw it in the trash. I filled
up Baxter’s water bowl and patted him a couple times on the head. He deserved that.
I grabbed my keys, searching for my copy to Evan’s apartment to lock the door. It
was cold in my hand, as if it had been chilled in the freezer. I had thought about leaving
it, thinking that this might have been what would break Evan and me. I didn’t though; I
believed that there was still hope, because if I gave up everything so simply, I don’t know
what it was that I would hold onto. I tightened my fist around the key to warm it up. I
didn’t want to lock up his apartment with a cold key. He would have never known, but I
would have, and if there’s anything I wanted to believe in, it was the idea that if anything
was going to tear me apart in all of this, it would be the love, not the hate. As long as it
was love, there was a chance that I could salvage all of the pieces, even if they didn’t fit
together like they did before.
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I put the key in the first lock and turned it once. Click.
I put the key in the second lock and turned it. Click.
I slid the key in my pocket, pressing it tightly against my thigh so that I could be
sure it would stay warm all the way back to school.
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“When I counted up my demons, saw there was one for every day. With the good ones on
my shoulders, I drove the other ones away.”- Coldplay
I went hiking with my dad when I was seven years old. The trail seemed to keep
going and going, and my small feet were exhausted from the hours of walking. I was
determined though to reach a destination that was never really set to begin with. We
stopped for a break, and I decided that it would be my time to explore. I climbed over
small boulders and through tall bushes until I was completely by myself. I think that may
be the first time in my life that I was explicitly alone. Naturally, I panicked. I spent all of
five minutes searching for my way back to the path, but I couldn’t find it. So I stopped,
and I started crying. The tears burst from my eyes taking no time to leave small round
circles in the earth as the dirt soaked them up.
After realizing that my fate was sealed and there was no way whatsoever that I
would live through this endeavor, I became comfortable with all of the silence. Even as a
seven year old, there was something profoundly comforting about living in the
nothingness. The trees seemed to be breathing in a pattern that I could identify with; I
wasn’t scared of what would happen to me, only to be found about two minutes later by
Dad who knew where I was the entire time.
I have found that a great majority of the moments that I’ve learned the most about
myself are moments that I have spent in solitude. I’m naturally someone who hates to be
alone; I fear what could happen if left by myself for too long. It’s this idea that I have to
look myself in the mirror and begin to understand the person that I present to the world,
so as I backed out of the parking lot at Evan’s apartment that day, I knew that who I saw
in the rearview mirror would take some time to fully understand. By this time, it had been
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about four weeks since I had first told Evan, two weeks since I had found out that Dad
was a suspect in the case, one week since I had sat in the parking lot of the police
department for over three hours debating whether I should tell the truth about the entire
situation, and about eight minutes since Evan had broken up with me. All of the timelines
were beginning to run together, so I had to ignore the concept of time completely. I
pulled off the rearview mirror in my Jeep because, you know, I can do that, and I decided
to drive. I was never really sure where I was going, but I did know that wherever I ended
up had all the potential in the world in comparison to that parking lot.
For a moment, I felt like the best solution for the time being would be to pretend.
So that’s what I did. I pulled off on the first stretch of abandoned highway I could find,
and I drove. Soon the houses became fewer and fewer in between. I began to remember
what it was like to be home. Everything was oddly comforting being back the way that it
used to be. No one was dead or hurting or sad. There were no secrets; there were no
explanations, just stretches of land and soccer on Saturdays and middle school recitals.
Before college, my life was simply complex. I had issues, of course, but they were buried
down so deeply that none of them were ever a necessity to face.
The drive became even simpler; I put my hand out the window and let it fly
between the gusts of wind that would lift it up and bring it down. I steadied the steering
wheel; I was safe because I managed to find what I assume is the only straight and
narrow road in North Georgia. Somehow, the roads had come to define me. Most of them
were curvy, with a few extreme cases that came along with hairpin turns and drop offs
that made you dizzy to even think about. Those roads would travel up and down
mountains, causing your ears to pop with all of the confusion enlaced within the altitude
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changes. A lot of times, I wondered how much simpler driving would be if I lived out
west with highways that stretched farther than the eye could begin to make out. That
would not be Georgia though; those roads could never begin to understand everything
that I’ve been through in my life.
These stretches that I’ve come to remember so vividly have delivered me to deer
hunting spots and fishing trips and soccer tournaments. They have nursed me back to
health on the days that only the road could understand the extremity of life. This one,
however, was straight and simple. That day, I longed for simplicity. I needed something
to remind me of everything that had existed before all of this happened. And for a brief
moment in time, it did. The radio was on the station my momma always listened to, some
eclectic mix of country and pop and soft rock. My hand was floating softly in the air. The
Beatles swooned into the Jeep, cycled through the air, and quickly dissipated into the
biting autumn air, “Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup. They slither
while they pass. They slip away across the universe.” I had captured simplicity.
All of a sudden, white smoke began to filter through the gaps between the hood
and fender. The smoke gradually increased, and the simplicity was over. “Fucking water
pump,” I whispered. I could diagnose what was going on with Jeep by the color of the
smoke paired with the smell that it produced. Thin white smoke that smelled hot and dry
was definitely the water pump. Jeep would have to sit for twenty minutes at least just to
cool down enough to remove the cap without scalding my hand. I popped the hood and
watched billows of smoke rush out in a continuous blanket stream from the front only to
disappear into the bright blue sky.
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I sat back in my seat savoring the last drops of simplicity until it all settled back
in. I can’t be sure if it was because of the speedy transition from sheer happiness to
reality, but I cried in a way that I hadn’t cried since before Patrick died. All of it had
become too much. The full cast of crying was all there: tears, sniffles, the crying hiccups,
the burning eyes, the quivering lips. Everyone played their parts, and I cried the way I
had wanted to cry for over two months. Between fits of tears and sobs, I managed to sing
out the remnants of The Beatles, “Nothing’s gonna change my world, nothing’s gonna
change my world.” Then in the midst of all the tears and lyrics and clouds of smoke, it
happened all over again. I was alone. Evan and Patrick and Dad and Momma and even
Jeep couldn’t save me, not for at least twenty minutes. So, I took as an opportunity. There
were no prosecuting or defense attorneys like I had been expecting; Dad nor Evan was
there to explain my obligations, and Jeep had taken an appropriate hiatus so that I would
have to face this world alone. The only opinion I wanted was one that had never been
entirely too far away from me to begin with.
The smoke had gradually faded as I started searching my backseat for a piece of
paper. I found an old grocery ticket, one of the ones that had the survey coupon special
on it, so it was super long. I don’t know what made me want to do what I did next, but I
grabbed a pen, and I wrote until I was confident in my ability to change my own life. I
wrote in the tiniest letters I could, knowing that I had a lot to get down on such a small
canvas. I have that ticket in my pocket today, folded neatly even though the edges have
become torn.
“Momma,
Do you still love me? Am I even allowed to love myself anymore? I don’t know who I
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blame for all of this, but I know that at one point I blamed you, and I wanted to apologize
for that. I’ve watched lives be torn apart in some of the worst ways that I can’t explain. I
have no one to talk to anymore, and I can’t talk to God, at least the God that I knew back
when. I’m caught in the middle of two sins that I don’t even know if I believe in anymore.
On one hand, I’m stained by the spirit of a man who happened to die by the hand of
another. I allowed Patrick to be murdered. I’ve kept the secret for Dad and allowed no
one to pay. Who could love someone that would do that? You’ve wanted me to love my
entire life, and as I sit here writing this, I feel like I’ve been abandoned by the one aspect
of humanity that I’ve always believed in. And in the other hand, I hold the sin of loving
someone that society has told me not to. I’ve played out your reaction a thousand times in
my mind, and I’d give anything to be able to tell you all of this in person because I have
faith that you would have loved me regardless. I don’t know if I want to believe in a God
or a world that condemns someone for loving another human, no matter the sex. At the
core of all of that, you always taught me that God is my foundation, first and foremost, so
I created my own God. I believe that the God who lives with you wherever you are is a
God that loves me because I value love over everything else. As far as the God we
believed in, I guess that he and I are nothing more. That’s implying that he ever existed
to begin with. I’ve lived with guilt for months now, lying awake at night mentally
whipping myself with the memories of a dying man and all of the people that I’ve hurt in
this process. I’ve prayed without answer for the longest time, and for a while, I thought
that meant that God would never forgive me. I don’t like what I’ve done, Momma, but at
some point, there’s got to be a breaking point. There has to be a moment that you forgive
yourself in order to be forgiven by everyone else that has been affected. Will you forgive
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me, Momma? For everything? God never did, but sometimes I wonder if I misunderstood
what I was praying about. Why would God grant me forgiveness for the aspects of life
that I never had control over to begin with? Just in case I’m wrong, pass the words onto
him and send as much of my love as you can absorb from my words.
In the tiny space at the bottom of the receipt, I squeezed in one final line.
I miss you. All the time.—Jeremy
The writing was almost unreadable because I wrote smaller and smaller as the
ticket paper began to run out. I had to get it all down though, on one piece of paper, one
time. I looked at it, and I took in a breath of air that chilled my chest. I held the ticket
tightly in my hand and closed my eyes. Life is a hard thing to gauge. I’ve always been
concerned with making mistakes, life-changing mistakes. One thing I’ve contemplated
though is defining what exactly a life-changing mistake is. We are only given one life, so
why is it that we are so hard on ourselves for the supposed mistakes that we’re making
that will never be able to be compared to a succeeding life? The complication in all of
this is less about the mistakes we make and more about living with the choices that we
are presented with.
Those words were so much more to me than a child’s attempt to communicate
with a soul that had passed on; those words were my first steps toward living with
myself. I remember sitting there and soaking in that letter when one of Momma’s favorite
songs came on the radio. “I’ve been afraid of changing cause I built my life around you.
But time makes you bolder; children get older, and I’m getting older, too.” I can’t be sure
if Momma had a hand in that song coming on that day. I’m not usually one to believe in
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stuff like that. That’s not to say that God or the people in his heaven don’t have the power
to make moments like that happen, but in my mind, there’s enough going on after life that
would keep everyone pretty occupied. Maybe though, just maybe, that was the answer
that I had been looking for all along. I couldn’t be sure what the message behind the
words was. I had built my life around a lot of things: Momma and Dad, Evan, the secret
of my sexuality, and more recently, Patrick. What bothered me most of all is that my
name had never existed in that list.
That was the day I decided exactly what I would say at the trial. If love meant as
much to me as it did within that letter I wrote on the back of a Kroger receipt, and if I
meant as much to me as I wanted me to, then there was really only one option that ever
existed within my heart. Evan and Dad are not the ones that have to live with that
decision, maybe the ramifications, but not the decision.
After I finished writing that letter, I folded it up and stuck it in my back pocket.
The tears on my face had dried, and I put the rearview mirror back on to get a look at
what kind of disaster I looked like at the end of all of that. It’s a widely known fact that
when people cry, no matter the subject matter or gravity of the sob, love to look at
themselves in the mirror during and/or after the cry. It’s like a visual affirmation to us
that we took time out of our rigid, human lives to bring light to the fact that we still have
the ability to feel things.
I got out of Jeep and opened up the hood, noticing the rusty mixture that bubbled
out of the water pump and all over everything surrounding it. I took a small washcloth
and twisted the cap off to let the last bit of steam escape the pump so that I could replace
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the water to get back home. Turning the lid off is like popping a balloon. You don’t really
understand the magnitude of what it’s going to do, so I turned my face away and
squeezed my eyes shut. Nothing happened. All of the pressure had escaped and was gone
by the time I took the lid off. I opened my eyes and realized that the place I had come for
simplicity and escape was no different now than it was before the Jeep started smoking
up. I looked up toward the bright blue sky that met the hills way down close to the
horizon. The sky and the landscape weren’t that much different than I remembered it
from when I was little, and with some exceptions to my physical state and simple life
lessons, I would bet that the sky would say the same thing about me.
I slammed the hood back down on the Jeep after filling the water pump back up. I
started the engine and began to put it in drive, but all of a sudden, I had an urge to do
something that I promise I’ve only done once in this story. I, singlehandedly, changed the
song that was playing. I’m sure it seems simple, but over my entire life, I had become so
accustomed to letting the song play, no matter if I liked it or not. However, I had a song
in mind; I didn’t feel comfortable letting fate decide what the next song in my life would
be. I scanned my iPod for one particular selection, pressed play, and I turned it up as loud
as the speakers would let it play. “When I counted up my demons, saw there was one for
every day. With the good ones on my shoulders, I drove the other ones away.” I pulled
back onto the road, thought of Momma, and smiled. I spun the wheel with both hands
turning back toward the city, and I pressed the gas as hard as my foot would allow me to.
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“If there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks,
I’ll follow you into the dark.”- Death Cab for Cutie
So that’s the story. Or at least all of the important parts that make this story
whole. That’s as truthful as I could possibly be, and as I hear that the recess has ended, I
know that it’s my turn to go up to the stand and to answer questions that have nothing to
do with this story at all. In the midst of all of the questions and spins that are placed upon
the responses, it’s as if we’re not even here today to figure out what exactly happened to
Patrick Campbell. We’re here to point fingers until something makes sense to someone.
Evan decided to come today; he’s sitting in the back, as if his presence will help me
finally place a cap on all of this. Dad asked me to not include myself in the entire
situation. He’s ready to pay for his sin if this jury finds him to be guilty. And then there’s
me, who I think everyone has forgotten about. That’s not to say that this court case is for
me; it is about Patrick. But the thing is, I could get up there and say that I never left my
dorm room that night. I could say that I was Evan’s all night that night and really blow
things out of proportion. Then Evan would be called to the stand, and he might have to
face the same predicament that I’m facing, but like I said in the beginning of all of this,
before I even told my story: I will tell the truth, first and foremost.
“The defense calls Jeremy Parker to the stand.” Every step feels heavy. I look
down at my pants, watching each small brush of air push the gray fabric against my legs.
I think I’ve been envisioning this for so long, the idea of doing it is surreal. For a
moment, I forget everything I am going to say, like some kind of ridiculous performance
anxiety. I slide inside the wooden box, turn toward the rows of pews staring straight
ahead at me, and like magic, it all comes rushing back.
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“Mr. Parker, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so
help you God?”
“I do.” Gulp.
Dad’s attorney walks around from behind a desk, looking like he’s been
rehearsing some kind of major motion picture script for weeks. I can hear his footsteps
echo through the courtroom. Click. Click. Click. Click. “Jeremy, how are you doing
today?”
Nauseous. Angry. Faint. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“Great. Now do you remember where you were on the night of August 29, 2011?”
He took no time to jump right into the questions. I feel startled by the sudden
guerilla warfare questioning. “Um, well I was in my dorm room most of the night,
working on the beginning of a term paper.” Correct, Jeremy. Ten points to you.
“Do you remember getting a call that night from your Dad’s cell phone?” he asks.
I’m sorry, Dad. I’ve got to do this, “Yes sir.”
“And do you remember how that conversation went?”
Damn it, Jeff. “Well, I remember that it wasn’t Dad. One of the guys he knows
from the bar called. I like to call them Jeffs.” No one laughed… awkward. I feel myself
involuntarily slide down in the seat, “I’m sorry. Yes, the guy on the other end asked if I
would come and pick Dad up because he had too much to drink.”
“And did you go pick him up from the bar that evening?”
“Yes, I did.”
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Here it comes. I don’t think I could have ever prepared myself for this moment. I
know that everything counts in this moment. I have this weird need to reach up and rub
my face, but I don’t. I feel like if I do that, Patrick’s blood will be all over my face, just
screaming the entire story without ever speaking it out loud. I want to get up and just
leave the courtroom, as if I never had any relevance to the case other than the fact that my
dad was the one suspected of the crime. But the defense needs me as much as the
prosecution. Everyone needs me to—
“Did you witness your father kill Patrick Campbell that night, Jeremy?”
I don’t want to pause. I don’t want to even think about my answer to this. I want to just
say it and for it to all be over with.
“No, I did not.”
I look back at Evan, expecting some kind of disgust, if he is even still there. He
surprised me again. He’s just staring at me with this puzzled look on his face, as if he is
trying to calculate my next response. He just looks blank, but not in the way is concealing
anger or sadness. Just blank.
“Would you please explain to the jury what happened that night?”
“Well, I pulled into the bar and met Dad and his friends at the front. Dad wanted
to talk, so I told them to go on back home. I started helping Dad back to my Jeep. He was
rough that night; you know, just too much to drink. He walked back to the Jeep with me,
and I told him we’d come back the next day and get his truck. After that we left.”
“You went directly from the bar to your Jeep?”
“I believe so.” I want to rub my face so bad, just to get the blood going back. “He wanted
to drive home, but I knew that he couldn’t drive, so I got him to the Jeep and we just
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drove back.”
I really am sorry, Patrick. If you can hear me, please do know that I’m sorry.
“And after you left, where did you go?”
“We went to the house. I made sure that he got in, and then I drove back to school
and went to sleep.” I can hear all of the songs. All at once. They are all playing back in
my head; all of the moments that define this testimony are looping through as if they’re
one agglomeration of notes.
“So with no vehicle to leave his house, in addition to the fact that you delivered
your inebriated father home that night, do you believe that there is any way that Franklin
Parker, your father, could have killed Patrick Campbell that evening?”
“No, I don’t.”
“And Jeremy, did you see—” Oh please, dear Lord, don’t ask me if I saw Patrick
Campbell that night, “—anyone else in the parking lot that evening?” Okay, that’s not as
bad as directing it toward Patrick alone. “No, sir.”
“The defense rests.” It was suddenly so simple. Everything was very briefly
stated. All that he needed was an alibi, but I knew that couldn’t be the end of it all. I
looked over at the prosecutor shuffling through all of his papers and stacks of pale yellow
memo pads. I knew the next part was more complicated; it would take more finesse and
attention than the first.
This is where it gets interesting. This moment is what I’ve been waiting on
because this is the only thing left that I can do for Patrick. After sitting and thinking about
everything that has happened to Patrick and me over the past few months, one of the
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hardest things to swallow is that no matter what I do, there is nothing that will ever bring
him back. In a way, I can feel Patrick sitting beside me. I expected him to be angry. I
expected everyone to be angry today, for some reason or another. But if anyone gets this,
it’s Patrick. He’s sitting right here, beside me, sweet face and blonde hair and all. I can’t
explain it to you; I just know that he’s here. The prosecuting attorney steps forward. He’s
a big man, and he’s wearing all black. He, too, looks like he’s practiced his performance
for weeks now. He’s working off of one eyewitness testimony of someone who might
have seen the owner of the red truck approach the man outside. I know that I never saw
him, and if he was there, shame on him. Shame on him, and shame on me.
The prosecutor reaches for one of the yellow pads and stands up. He didn’t look
that huge behind the desk, but as he starts walking toward me, he looks enormous. He’s a
huge man with ridiculously broad shoulders. He flips one page, and it falls slowly behind
his hand. He looks up at me with this face, as if he’s asking me are you ready for this
ride?
“Jeremy Parker, do you remember the specific time that you picked up your father?”
“Um, I would say that it was probably around two. Maybe two thirty?”
“And at what time did you arrive back at your dorm room?”
“I guess around 3:30?” I took off a little bit of time hoping that it would account for the
loss.
“Are you aware that there was an eye witness account of your father assaulting Patrick
Campbell?”
“Yes.” I’m not sure how much of an implication saying yes means.
“And even with that, you would still attest that your father did not kill Mr. Campbell?”
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“Yes. From what I’ve heard, eye witnesses only recall about ten percent of what they
witnessed, so any man with my Dad’s build could have been the murderer.” I hear a
couple giggles from around the courtroom. Yeah, wasn’t trying to be funny on that one. I
could see the prosecutor starting to get frustrated. There wasn’t a lot he could do with me
in relation to the details of the murder. I guess he could try to trip me up; he could get me
to say something that might open a window for him to break me down, but I’ve been
preparing for this for too long. I can almost tell you how the rest of this is going to—
“Jeremy, is it true that your father has been known for making homophobic slurs in the
past?”
All of a sudden, I see Dad’s lawyer jump up from his seat, “Objection. The counsel is
making broad accusations irrelevant to this case.”
The judge looks over, “Sustained.” I could feel it bubbling out of me though. I couldn’t
stop myself.
“No, it’s okay. Yes, he has.”
The judge looks down at me, “If I say sustained, you are not obligated to answer the
question.”
“I know.”
The prosecutor begins again, “So is it possible that your father could have harbored
homophobic sentiments about Mr. Campbell that evening?”
“Objection!”
“Possibly,” I hear the entire courtroom just sort of go silent. I feel like Dad’s
lawyer is about to come up and shake the living hell out of me for even entertaining these
questions, but I need to win this case more than Dad does. “I suppose anything is
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possible. Have you ever harbored any homophobic feelings for any homosexual, sir?”
“I don’t think that’s relev—“ I cut him off. Evan had gotten up to walk out of the room,
but he stopped.
“No, I don’t think it’s relevant either. Not to Patrick. But it is to someone. Maybe it was
the last person you shied away from because you thought he had HIV or was going to try
to kiss you or make you do something that makes you less of a man.” Why has no one
stopped me yet? “And yes, at one point in time, that man over there probably harbored
his own share of homophobic sentiments. Against Patrick? No. He stopped harboring
homophobic sentiments the day that I told him I was gay.” The truth.
Evan turned around, and I could see him staring directly at him, but I don’t want
to make eye contact with him because I’m not doing this for him. I can literally feel a
beam from Dad’s eyes scorching my body, but I’m not going to look at him either. He
already knows. I know he does, and if I’m taking this fall for him, then I know that he can
take the fall for me. We’re married in this, and I don’t mean in the New York City passes
gay marriage kind of way; I mean Dad and I are married in this lie for the rest of our
lives. He can’t hate me for this.
“And I mean, it wasn’t easy, sir. I was raised in a house where the notion of a
homosexual lifestyle was not entertained at all. That was morally wrong and an
abomination in God’s eyes, but when Momma died a couple years ago, I decided that
facing my true self was the least of our worries. In time, it became the least of his as well.
Finding out that he was accused of this act broke my dad’s heart. Has my dad made
homophobic slurs in the past? Absolutely. Has my dad had any homophobic sentiments
in the past? I’m sure he has. Have I made homophobic slurs in the past or had
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homophobic sentiments? Sure. I think we all have, so there’s just as good of chance
based on those claims that I murdered Patrick Campbell. However, I did not. Neither did
that man sitting over there because killing Patrick Campbell on the assumption that he
was gay would be like killing me. Putting people’s mistakes on trial is asking for more
questions than you would want answered about yourself. So, in terms of this case, if
you’re asking if that man over there—“ Dad’s crying. Why is Dad crying? My eyes are
beginning to burn as well, and a knot is growing in my throat, “—if you’re asking if that
man over there killed Patrick Campbell, the answer is no. I picked him up from a bar that
we used to go to, and I took him home, and after that I went home myself. I don’t know a
lot about Patrick, but from what I’ve seen on the news, he and I aren’t that different.
Because my dad has loved me, regardless of who I am, he has done more for men like us
than anyone can even begin to imagine.”
Evan is still standing at the back of the courtroom with a frozen look of
astonishment on his face. I finally garner up the courage to look over at Dad, and he’s
still crying. I couldn’t tell you what he is thinking, but he doesn’t look angry or sad at all.
He just looks… there, like a little boy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad look so real in
my life. The entire courtroom is silent, and then I hear the prosecutor’s footsteps start to
walk away from me. I look up, and I can hear him flipping a couple pages in that yellow
pad. Most of all, I can feel Patrick beside me, and for some reason, I think he’s okay with
the idea that this could be the only thing that came out of his death. In all of the
proceedings leading up to today, there was no evidence. No hair or blood transferred. Just
the shaky testimony of an eye witness, and I think if things had gone the way they were
supposed to, this attorney would have solidified the actions of Dad by his general
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behavior.
I can feel the uneasiness in the room, and then all of a sudden, the judge leans forward,
“Are there any other questions you have counselor?”
The prosecutor turns around, but says nothing. There is a long pause and then he says,
“No, your honor.”
Just like that it’s all over. I want to go up and hug Dad, but I know it’s not
appropriate. A hug could cause more problems than good at this point, but I think what
breaks my heart the most is that he just sort of wants to hug me as much I as I want to
hug him. I slide out from behind the stand, and I would just take my seat, but I feel like
something needs to burst out of me. I walk down the aisle, past Evan, and into
courthouse. I see all these people in suits walking around with brief cases dotted within
the people like me. There are people who have come to court because of a warrant or an
order of protection. Some are there to testify or to clear up a traffic violation, and here I
stand. No one knows that I just testified for a murder, none of them. No one knows that I
just came out to my father on the stand, except for Dad, Patrick, and me. Well, and Evan,
who I can see approaching me from the corner of my eye.
After scanning the lobby for a bathroom, I start toward it as fast as I can. I keep
picking up speed hoping that maybe there’s a window I can escape out of or a time
machine that will transport me so far back or forward that none of this will matter. I push
open the door and neither of those things is in there, so I choose the farthest stall away in
hopes that maybe that will be enough. I sit down, and I can finally rub my face. Thank
God for rubbing my face. My hands are cold and wet, and for some reason that is
comforting in comparison to my scorching hot face. I can feel the heat leaking out of
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every pore. Everything hits me all at once. What kind of person am I? I just used a
murder case of a gay man to come out to my dad. What kind of twisted person uses
another person’s life to do that? I can feel it all coming on: the knot, the burning, the
everything. I hear a knock on the door.
“It’s taken,” is all I can bear to get out.
“Jeremy, it’s me.” I can’t do this right now Evan. I just can’t do all of this. I unlock the
door because trying to do this through a stall door is just not going to work out. Evan is
just standing there, looking down at me with tears in his eyes.
I try to control my breathing, but it turns into these quick deep breaths that I can’t control.
I can feel my bottom lip start to tighten up, and I look up at Evan.
“What kind of person does what I just did?”
He squats down in front of me, “Jeremy.” His voice is at a whisper. It’s not harsh or
angry, just understanding. At this point, tears are bursting out. “He’s gone. Patrick’s
gone, and I can do anything about it, Evan.” All of the words were being interrupted by
these short quick breaths in between them.
“Jeremy, stop. You’re right; Patrick is not coming back. He was never going to
come back. When he died out there in that parking lot, there was nothing you could have
ever done to bring him back. Nothing that you could have said in there would have ever
been able to bring him back to life. But what you said in there gave at least a little bit of
justification for why he died. You’re free, Jeremy. You did what what you did, and you
chose what to say, and you’re free now.” He stands up and grabs me, pulling me in for a
quick hug. I feel him kiss me on the top of the head, and he left the bathroom. I would get
up and go after him or ask him to stay, but I know that what Evan and I had is over. He’s
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proud of me, for some reason. I know that, but I also know that everything that happened
can’t be remedied by a proclamation in court. I’m okay with that. I didn’t do all of that
for any kind of reward or ramification. I did it because it was something that I had to do. I
needed to tell the truth.
I need a minute of clarity, just to figure it all out. I need to understand the gravity
of everything that just happened, but I don’t think that’s something that will happen for
me in a matter of minutes spent in the far stall of the bathroom. I take a couple deep
breaths just to gather myself together, and I stand up. For the first couple minutes, my
legs feel weak, like they’re about to fall out from underneath me. I could go back into the
courtroom and hear everything else that will happen today, but I’ve done all that I can do.
I told as much of the truth as I could for the day, and after today, Patrick’s story is one
that I will not tell again. He has allowed me to use him as a crutch for too long, and I look
forward to letting him rest.
I leave the bathroom and search for a door. I need some fresh air or something to
settle my stomach. I step outside, and for a moment, I’m surprised that the world is still
spinning. Everyone seems to be going about their business the same way that they were
before I testified. The cop cars are still parked outside, and the traffic is still going up and
down the main road of the city. I step into the sunlight and look up directly at the sun.
Momma always told me that I should never do that because it might make me go blind,
so I turn and look into the clouds. I try to see past them, imagining what’s up there or
rather who is up there. As scary of a notion as it seems, I want to know what they’re all
thinking. I want to be able to understand whether or not they all believe that what I did
was enough to put this all to rest. The warmth on my face is just strong enough to combat
112
the cold breeze that is wrapping its way around all the buildings of downtown, and even
though I can’t be completely sure, it’s as if it’s the answer I’ve been looking for. I find a
bench to sit down on, and I tilt my head back toward the sun and close my eyes, “You
can rest, Patrick. We can all rest.”
113
Afterward
It’s been a year to the day that Patrick died, eight months since Dad was declared
innocent, and six months since I last saw Evan. You’d be surprised with the amount of
clarity that happens in a year’s time. I think of Patrick everyday; there’s always
something that reminds me of him. The weirdest part about him is that I only remember
the seconds that I saw him alive. Some people would say that it’s probably because of
some self-preservation mode that the brain goes into. I would probably say that it’s
simply because in my mind, he never truly died. Maybe in the physical sense, and that’s a
pretty big sense to die in, don’t get me wrong, but his spirit still lingers around inside me.
For a while, I felt like that was my punishment. I remember the day that the trial
ended so vividly and the notion that everything was finally free and clear. I suppose that
was an idealistic thought. After time though, I realized that having Patrick live within me
made me a much better person on the whole; he gives me a sense of confidence that I’ve
never had before because I know that in a way I will always be living for two people
instead of one.
As for Dad, he’s learned to live with all of it. Sort of. I think the key element to
this whole situation is letting time have the power in our lives that it needs to have. Like
many coming out situations, there was a certain pattern to it all. Embracement, denial,
anger, a little more denial, then eventual embracement, which is okay. I never assumed it
would be magical. I don’t think any parent ever anticipates that he or she will have a gay
child, at least not in their generation. It makes me realize that when I have children of my
114
own, I want to support them in whatever or whomever they want to become, as long as
they never want to hurt another person.
In terms of Patrick, I think the shock of it hit Dad once he was proclaimed
innocent. In a way, I think he hoped that he would be found guilty. If someone else is
blaming you for the wrong you do, you’re never obligated to blame yourself. When we
have to stand in the mirror and look down at the blood on our hands and the anger we
have withheld in our hearts, that’s when we’re hurt the worst. At this point, I think he
looks for ways to vindicate Patrick’s death, as if he has to spend the rest of his life
making up for the mistake he made. I hope there’s a day that’s not the case anymore. I
can’t imagine that Patrick or God would want that for him. On Mamaw’s birthday this
past June, one of my uncles stated how much of a shame it was to have a queer in the
family. Dad punched him in the face. I think we’re all moving one day at a time,
hopefully with one less wadded up hand. If you asked him about my lifestyle today, he
would say, “I don’t know how much I support it as a whole, but I know that I support
you, and that’s all I have to say about that as far as I’m concerned.” And as far as I’m
concerned, that’s enough for me right now.
I’m taking a year off since I graduated this year. Senior year was a lot. There was
a lot to process that most seniors don’t have to go through, and I’ve moved home for
now. I think Dad and I needed that, probably him a little more than me. There was a
necessity in processing all of this together. Arnold and I have stayed close, and it took
months to convince Dad that he and I weren’t dating. Having Arnold around through all
of this has been great; I still haven’t told him about Patrick, and I doubt I ever will. He
always assumed that the biggest reason that Evan and I didn’t work out was because the
115
pressure that the trial put on us and the secrecy of my sexuality. I guess in a way, he
doesn’t need to ever know any more than that. I can’t predict the future, but I can’t
imagine my life without Arnold; he’s the kind of friend that you just can’t lose. Ever.
The hardest part has been Evan. I wasn’t lying when I said that I thought we were
together for a reason, and I miss him all the time. At this point, he’s found someone else,
and I really am happy for him. In the most painful way possible, of course. For the
longest time, I hoped it was a rebound thing, and in my mind, there will always be a part
of me that will be with Evan. I thoroughly believe that you never forget your first love.
Arnold keeps me updated, only because I ask him. I want Evan to be happy, and I wish
there was something I could have done that could have changed the outcome. I have no
idea how Evan and I haven’t crossed paths, but I suppose if it’s ever supposed to happen
it will. I hope there will be a time in the future that I can tell him all the things that I wish
I could have that day in the bathroom. I love you. I miss you. You deserve everything.
“Nothing compares, no worries or cares, regrets and mistakes, they are memories made,
who’d have known how bittersweet this would taste.”- Adele. But if that time never
comes, I hope the music that defined our relationship finds its way to his ears and
provides a sweet memory of how great things were in a time when details weren’t so
complicated.
As for me, I’m not sure what exactly there is to say. My life is partly a
culmination of all the people that are around me, and one big chunk of everything that is
sloshing around up inside of my head. My life has not changed that much since coming
out. I already had one foot out the door; the biggest step was telling the family. For the
longest time, everyone just sort of ignored it, but the thing is, the only one I cared about
116
all that much was Dad. If he could come to terms with it all, then I wasn’t terribly
concerned about the rest. I promised myself something a while back and will hold true to
that promise until the day I die; no one aspect about my life will ever come to define me
as an individual, whether that be a career, my sexuality, or any other detail. We are
comprised of too many things to find solace in the one thing we believes trumps the rest.
The year off has been really great so far. Of course, it’s only been a summer’s
time from graduation, so I’m sure my feelings will change by the time May rolls around.
I’m working on my LSAT and taking my time with law school admissions. I know it’s
awfully stereotypical to get a Political Science degree and then go to law school, but I
feel like I have an obligation in my hands. I know that what I did that day was done out
of necessity, and I’m sure if a lot of people knew the story and heard me say that, they
would say it’s a copout. Regardless, it’s unfair for us to judge the details and decisions of
other people’s lives; there’s no way that we could ever say that we would do any better or
worse. For me though, the kind of law I hope to practice has nothing to do with criminal
or trial law. That will always be a wound that is a little too far open for me to try and
close. I would love to go into human rights law because we still have a lot of room left to
cover in terms of righting the injustices that still float around this big world.
I get a little more okay every day. I think about all the things that have happened
and all of the decisions that I’ve made, and sometimes, I’m a little overwhelmed at the
idea that it all happened in a year’s time. I suppose I’ve come back here after a year to let
it all go or at least a good chunk of it. Just like everything else I had talked about before, I
don’t think it’s fair to let this one thing define my life. We act, we face the repercussions,
and then we have to find a way to move forward from all of that. We owe it to ourselves.
117
“Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly, all your
life, you were only waiting for this moment to arrive.”- The Beatles. All my love.
118
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