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A Syllabic View Of Death

by Robert Edward Bell

Richard Brautigan was growing old. Memories must have passed before his eyes in those last fading years of the 1970s and 1980s along Columbus Avenue, where the infamous North Beach wild bunch had once held free reign.

There was a time in the early days, when coffee had flowed for free behind the counter at City Lights Bookstore, and the scene had been a great deal quieter. It was here that Brautigan would often spend his afternoons. Lost in his mysterious sense of humor, he gave no apparent signs that he was planning his own death. Most people that saw Brautigan would later say that he seemed happy in the last days that they spoke to him.

The discovery of his body on October 25, l984, in Bolinas? seemed to catch his closest friends and relations off guard, but a closer study of his writings reveal a mind boardering on the darker regions of the subconscious, obsessed with death, as well as imagery surfacing the internal depths of depression. This darkness of imagery that seemed to give his narrative its' literary power may have stemned from an uncontrollable depression that would eventually lead to his self-destruction.

Not surprisingly, a large amount of his writing — as exemplified by Trout Fishing In America, A Confederate General from Big Sur, and In Watermelon Sugar — deals with themes of death and redemption. Even the recently published Unfortunate Woman follows along these characteristics. Imagery and a playful use of sounds with syllables in a simplified form are aspects that gave his writing such strength. This use of minimalism tied with his use of prose in a tight creative fashion.

"Simple sentences and minimal rhythms occur in Brautigan's fiction, too, but they work with his metaphors to obtain a more complex effect than in his poetry. By controlling the colloquial sound of his prose, Brautigan developed a strategy for releasing emotion while utilizing the anarchic and comical responses of his imagination." (p. 150)

In Watermelon Sugar, a book that would give his critics and audience an unconventional novel, shows some of the strengths of this minimalism. Typical Brautigan, the novel moves from scene to scene using a technique of flashbacks, simple stripped-down dialogue, and imagery bordering on the buried past to convey meaning to characters within the framework of an unorthodox timeline. Inside the setting of a Utopian community in an imaginary past, the author leaves the reader with a sense of future context.

The narrator ends his tale with the death of his heroine, while leaving the text intact. Sentences continue running long after the characters have left the stage of this play. The book closes leaving the reader with a feeling of no finality. It is difficult to tell whether there has been a beginning or ending to this chain of events; only that a story has been told. The plot revolves around an uncertain center, and it is this characteristic that gives his use of minimalism its post modernistic structure.


Online Source: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/beat_boulevard/81315(external link)