Dialogues?

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to post it or not, but a lot of people seemed to, so...here's mine.

I couldn't follow a single conversation for long enough, so I grabbed three separate snippets.

Attempt No. 1

• I've done some weird sh!t. I remember everything. I've only blacked out once. At 11:30, I was asleep. Woke up with my head in a trash bin.
• What?
• Yeah.
• Blacked out with your head in a trash can? That's crazy.
• ...
• So what class is next? Who do you have?
• Uh...(addressing someone else) Hey, yo, where's our class at? (didn't hear the answer...) Yeah, maybe I should know where my class is.
• Put it in your phone.
• ...Well, I finished my soup. Wish I could stay and chit chat, but I gotta run. It was good seeing ya.

Attempt No. 2 
 

• Absolutely. I've been thinking about that, too. We were having a conversation about that the other day, how people used to throw monkey leaves or bones on the ground to see what, you know-
• Throw open an alligator, pick through innards-
• Make it up!
• 'Oh, we gotta go to war!'
• Or if they didn't want to - 'looks like we're not going to war, guys!' I realized how we were talking and I saw how people probably talk about us. We seem the same, you know. They don't regard us as any different.
• 'Oh, this says this'.
• And they're probably all, 'Christians are crazy.'
• I feel crazy sometimes.
• But like, God is inherently different. Science is totally incompatible with anything to do about God.

Attempt No. 3

•   Some people don't realize office hours are for more than one person. I had a kid trail me-
• How'd he find you?
• Well, he followed me after class. I had to be picked up - obviously I don't drive and the world's thankful for that. My wife normally picks me up but she was out of town. This kid followed me all the way to the library. I finally had to be like, look kid, I have to go home now.

Next time, I'll type it rather than try to hand write it out.

Response to Bausch's "1-900"

This piece consists entirely of dialogue, which is fairly unusual in a short story. However, there are no quotation marks. Since the conversation is only between two people, Bausch denotes who is talking by creating a new paragraph every time it switches speakers.

Because there isn't narration where a character describes their actions non-verbally, there is very little to set the scene. John describes himself on pg. 54 as "five feet eleven inches tall and I weigh a hundred and sixty pounds". John also provides us with his own best guess about the scene where Sharon is as she talks to him, admitting, "I'm picturing you sitting at one of those consoles with all the plugs and the lines, and ear phones on, like an operator" (60). While she insists she's naked in bed, the reader is not sure whether they can believe her and are left without a clear scene.

The reader is given a better sense of where John when he shares that his recent separation from his wife has left him "living alone in an apartment with most of the furniture gone and a lot of disarray I don't need" (62). His description of his physical appearance are also very clear. Since the reader is given no reason to doubt the truth of John's words, it is assumed that he is as he describes himself. However, since John distrusts Sharon's description of her location and since it is feasible to think that her job might require that she describe herself as such, it is difficult to distrust her description of her location.

There is an interesting role reversal at the end of the piece where John is now ready for phone sex, but Sharon has completely lost her ability to act along. This may change the reader's perception of the characters. In the beginning, it is fairly easy to sympathize with John, whose marriage fell apart. He describes being separated from his children and wondering if they are afraid of him, or if they know how much he loves them. As more is revealed about Sharon, the reader develops a deeper emotional connection to her. At the conclusion of the piece, when John is ready for the reason he called, the reader may feel that he is a little calloused. Sharon has obviously been upset by their conversation, as he brought up very personal hardships in her life. John has been saying "I love you" so many times, but she is reminded that his words mean nothing and they are not from the man she wants to hear them from. So not only is their relationship to each other reversed at the end, but the character whom the reader sympathizes with the most also switches from John to Sharon.

On Denis Johnson's "Emergency"

Since this piece was broken into many small sections separated by white space, it felt very disjointed and fragmented. This sensation was aided by the way each section jumped chronologically, and may have been to create the sense that the narrator's memories were as fragmented. It is clear that the events being related could be inaccurate, as the narrator second-guesses himself on pg. 392, saying "Or maybe that wasn't the time it snowed. maybe it was the time we slept in the truck and I rolled over on the bunnies and flattened them". The frequent references to drugs, and the semi-hallucination where the narrator mistakes a drive-in theater for angels descending through a rift in the sky, support that the author was probably hoping to achieve that effect. It was a little bit disconcerting, especially in the beginning of the piece before the pattern of fragmented sections was established.

The narrator is also removed from the events he is narrating. This distance is first felt when he introduces "fat quivering Nurse" whose name is merely her title. There is a disconnect from the events around him, which are evident on pg. 383 when he doesn't understand why Georgie is crying (I don't really get it either) and on pg. 388 when he and Georgie are both talking about separate destinations and not responding to each other at all.

To balance out this distance, Johnson calls attention to the moments that concern the narrator. On pg. 392, when it is discovered that the narrator has accidentally killed the baby bunnies, Johnson uses exclamation points to emphasis the impact the "Little feet! Eyelids! Even whiskers! Deceased" had on the narrator.

Still, the voice is very specific and conversational. Even the first sentence includes the common tag of "I guess". On the top of pg. 385, he described the blade in the injured man's eye as "a hunting knife kind of thing" rather than just calling it a hunting knife. These choices give the piece a conversational feel, making the narrator more human to the reader.

The dialogue between the characters uses many informal words and phrases that are unexpected in the adult world of the emergency room. For instance, Georgie talks about "goop inside of us" on pg. 383 and asks the narrator to listen to his shoes "squish" on pg. 394. This makes Georgie seem very childlike, as well as the image of him "bent over in the posture of a child soiling its diapers" (pg. 384). The doctor, also, uses simple language, requesting a team made up of an "eye man", "brain man", and "gas man" instead of using the professional titles of these specialists. Even the man with the knife in his eye repeatedly says "something like that" on pg. 385. It almost has the feel of children playing doctor.

Lydia Davis's "Television"

Lydia Davis's "Television" lacks dialogue, which makes the tone almost dry, matter-of-fact. Davis's frequent choice to refrain from using contractions, combined with the generalized nature of many of the sentences, also contributes to that tone. "They give us hints of what is to come and then it comes and it is exciting." There is no actual excitement to this statement. The short clauses and lack of adornment prevent that. Another example of generalization is found in the second section of the piece. "You are waiting until it is a certain hour and you are in a certain condition so that you can go to sleep." No specific hour is mentioned, and the condition is not described.

The piece begins in a vague, inclusive tense, frequently using an ambiguous 'we' that could describe only the narrators family and close companions or could include the reader. The first specific reference that begins to define the narrator is found at the top of page 210, "as the women in my family are not". As the narrator's character is solidified, the sentences become less vague. For example, on pg. 211, Davis includes such detail as "or you watch Pete Seeger's leg bounce up and down in time to his Reuben E. Lee song, then change the channel." At this point, the author uses second person. This was a daring move, at least to me, because of the specifics. Readers can easily be alienated if details in second person don't apply to them. However, as I was reading this piece, I did not find this to be the case.

In the third and final section of the piece, Davis returns to first person, stating that "at the end of the day...my life seems to turn into a movie." There is one unusual phrase that sticks out to me in particular. Davis writes, "I mean my real day moves into my real evening, but also moves away from me enough to be strange and a movie" (emphasis added). Instead of choosing to say "strange like a movie" or "as distant as a movie", she says "strange and a movie." I'm not really sure why she chose to say that.