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.