Surreal, Real, Too Real

Nathan Gale

In The Caretaker by Anthony Doerr we see the spectacle of intense realism shifted into almost surrealism with the Liberian apartheid. The narrator describes to us untold quantities of reckless violence which compared to the minute tragedies of Western living seems somewhat surreal, distorted and nightmarish. Although the story is based in pure historical realism this realism takes on a new persona from what is described to us, it takes on qualities of hyperrealism. The narrators quest for some kind of solid real world in which the order he once knew can return like the ledgers he once filled out and the bowl of rice he ate everyday at lunch starts with his relentless walking and ends up killing a man where he is chased by his guilt to a boat. As he travels to America, his life comes into focus for him, he no longer knows how to make sense of his life as he seems to exist in a duality between living and his guilt, all order has disappeared with the new order he has discovered. With this paradigm shift between unstable to stable, his life becomes oddly surreal. To cope with the pain he inflicted and once bore, he buries 5 beached whale’s hearts, a way of copping that signifies this shift in his being. What was dead grows into what feeds us. For him this a way of both burring his emotions and communing with aspects of his mother that stood out to him, he is in a sense regrowing his mother. Just as decaying matter restores life back to the world, the garden restored order back to is own life. His only friendship with a deaf girl seems to show us that he feels more emotionally attached to someone who is alone inside themselves not able to properly communicate with the world at large, as he feels this too both in his homeland and America, a stranger to himself. Yet We are never positive if his guilt drives him, or his loss of all identity. And in the end it makes us wonder what does the word “home” truly mean for him anymore.

In the Fathers Blessing, the story is narrated by a Catholic Father with uncomfortable realism. His way of making logic often leaves us with a creepy feeling of uneasiness, at first, wanting the measurements of the bride and groom for their burial, he makes it seem perfectly necessary yet we are suspicious of his logic. It is simplistic in reason, and we almost want to become empathetic with his wisdom but the peculiarity holds us back. Throughout the story his logic becomes more twisted. And we are suddenly given a scene in which both mother and daughter climb inside of the daughters vagina, and with that the transition is made. The priest follows his logic and we see just how logic and reason can easily become disturbed and make little to no sense. What may seem perverted to us the Father convinces us that it is in his line of duty. Yet this space the mother the and daughter discover is something in which they both have in common both in a literal and metaphorical sense. Just as a male, in sex, returns to the womb, the mother returns to her daughter through the shared passageway of their femininity, in a sense finding the mother inside of her daughter. In his “duty” the priests then suckles at the tit, he then shows us how a father, male in every aspect of the idea discovers a counterpart space in himself, his anima. That he has rekindle that aspect of his life which is so foreign and alien, and becomes a knew in his own eyes, a “midwife”, as he calls himself. That for once he sees the importance life has upon the world, a feminine aspect unknown to him, that death in its practicality is not nearly as important as the birth of new creation.

In the Two Brothers we are given a background and foreground that make no sense to us, no boundaries or certain details. We don't know where we are, what time we are set in or how are characters even come into play with each other, we know nothing for certain except for the fact both Aurel and Theron are brothers, perhaps this is all the author wants us to know. From the very begin realism is very short and undefined, the only two people who are to interact with each other in any defined fashion are the two brothers. The house seems to exist as an extension of their imagination a sort of extra room on their imagination that they walk between, as we never really know if dehydration and starvation are speaking or if the world they describing is truly real. Does the house really go on forever, does Daddy Norton really die, does anything really happen? The author tries tricking us into a world where we wonder what is real and what is hallucination, but all that is certain is the connection the two brothers hold for each other. Some things are certain and some things can never be certain. The brutal violence is grotesque and makes the characters seem emotionless but the intimacy they spend with each other defies that. It points out that the two main human emotions that all emotions divert from are the need for love and the inherit need to conquer and dominate each other.

When Mr. Pirzad Came To Dine by Jhumpa Lahiri is set in the stark realism of childhood, is a very Point of View Story as the narrator is a young innocent girl who knows nothing of the world and is isolated from her own culture except when the 6‘o'clock news rolls around. Her world is made up of the limitations of her knowledge but the innocence it is grounded in fundamentally rings true. An intense social tragedy is set upon the family of Mr. Pirzada, but we see it through such a small perspective we do not really know the stature of it, except that the narrator feels the pressure to pray, something odd for children to do on their own. Some things feel way to soft for comfort while others things become more dramatic, like the embarrassment the narrator has in explaining the tragedy of Dacca to her Trick o Treating partner. The child is limited by the weight of the emotions and knows not how to convey them. I too in my own childhood experienced the loss of not knowing the weight of a tragedy with the event of September 11 which i knew was something terrible, I had no way of constructing a clear image of the situation in my head, it seemed almost blurred. Like in The Caretaker, the protagonist play a role of cultural duality neither Indian or American, or African or American. They can identify properly which self image to pick from as either is valid as the other. While she may have Indian descent and parents she has grown up only knowing America, this odd tension seems to carry, as the conflict through the TV soon becomes her only glimpse of one of her two worlds. As with the denial of her teacher, she knows not any other way to communicate with her Indian heritage then to wait and listen for news of disaster and destruction. This is shared with Mr. Pirzad as well as he has just watched his country be annexed into another, his identity is a blur, who he was has vanished. Just as her identity becomes transparent with her teacher calling a book on Indian irrelevant, but how can any part of us become irrelevant?