Wednesday, February 25, 2009

See the Moon?

In 'See the Moon?', Donald Barthelme creates a character who frantically tries to explain everything he can about life to his unborn son, Gog. Gog, his beloved, hears about life in a fragmented (call it post-modern) frenzy, with bits of personal history from a few minutes in the past to many years ago. Like a human hopped up on too much coffee, suffering from too many thoughts with too little time to say them, the character jumps from idea to concept to obsessively categorizing certain aspects of life, trying desperately to get back to the main thread of what he feels necessary to be sharing with Gog. Similar to how Dean and Sal, in Kerouac's On the Road, rapidly talk while walking in the dark underneath the streetlights, and Dean says, "This is a parenthetical, Sal, and I shall get back to the main point at the very next street light."

See the Moon? captures for the reader the sheer volume of sights and sounds, understandings and perceived misunderstandings that patch together and highlight personal characters and lives. "In another month Gog leaps fully armed from the womb" (p.101, Sixty Stories, Peguin edition). This sentence comes at the end of Barthelme's short story and elucidates for us what the main character is trying to do with his constant abrupt changes and odd, personal reveries. He is dramatically and anxiously attempting to give every possible life experience to Gog before the baby is even born.

At times, the protagonist, if we can call him that, seems to be working out ideas and concepts for himself, because many things he says do not, and could not, apply to an unborn baby. "I set out to study cardinals...A perverse project, perphaps, but who else has embraced this point of view" (98)? A means for justification, by talking to the unborn child, while in reality working things outloud for himself.

Barthelme is famous for his off-the-wall, postmodern, and new way of telling a story. See the Moon? exemplifies his talent and gives support to why we still read him.