Now you’ve said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that’s all we ever talked about. We’d sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said ‘hopeless,’ though; that’s where we’d chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
John Givings
Beside the proposal for the trip to France (something every reader, I think, knows will never happen) the one real curve-ball, the one real Thing that happens in the story, is the appearance of John Givings. Though he is mentioned several times, what do you make of his two most notable appearances, Part 2 Chapter 5 and maybe more importantly Part 3 Chapter 1? What role does he serve in both the definition of the Wheelers as characters and the general theme of the story?
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I think John Givings gets to be a sort of soothseer (if we can count that as a word) in RR and as because, as can happen in classical literature like this, he has a measurable defect that allows people to dismiss him out of hand, whether or not he's hitting the nail on the head. Since he's ill, he has little to no compunction about calling out the Wheelers--and his mother, for that matter--for what they really are. Which is a sort of inverse to the ease with which Frank casts the schizo's truth-telling aside.
ReplyDeleteIn some ways you could argue that John is "free" and has "found himself" in a much more authentic way than the Wheelers ever did and maybe even ever really aspired to...
I thought Frank's perception of how other people saw him was very interesting. The narrator repeatedly told us that most people viewed Frank as charismatic and intelligent and on his way up. Frank himself was desperate for the approval of what he called "first-rate" people, and from what I can tell those people (at least, the ones who didn't know him well) thought he was all right. And yet John Givings'--an insane man!--disapproval was what really sent him over the edge. So I think that he was aware that John was the only person in the story who could call a spade a spade.
ReplyDeleteI think that the quote you gave is very interesting. I think it says that it is almost imposible to go on living if you think things are "hopeless." That's what got Obama a lot of votes. Hope.
ReplyDeleteI think that John serves the same purpose as Charles Barkley did (does) for the NBA. He's not afraid to say what everyone else is thinking. Some people can ignore things as long as no one actually says them. He definately pushes the Wheelers over the edge by stating the obvious. A lot of people have told me that when they were kids they were poor, but nobody ever told them, so they didn't realize that they were and it didn't bother them. Maybe the all the Wheelers needed to fall off of the cliff was a little push from someone who gave them a reality check. Unfortunately this results in April taking a substantial risk so that they may actually move to Europe as they said they were going to.
Personally, I couldn't see why moving to Europe with 3 kids was much different than moving there with 2, but maybe that's because I'm not a parent.
Maybe they thought that if an "insane" person could see through them to who they really were, everyone could, and then what was the point of putting on a show?