The Elevator

In the story “The Elevator” from Robert Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants me meet Martin. Martin is a shy guy. Probably not too handsome nor very popular. He is the silent bystander who is afraid to takes risks. Yet he is always on the edge, just waiting to jump in, but instead he jumps into his very active imagination. We are introduced to him on the elevator as he goes down, for the first time, to the basement. We are made to assume he thought it would be a horrible demonic place. But when he gets there: there is nothing. It just an empty meaningless basement. The real hell is the 14^th floor aka the floor where he spends most of his hours working. The floor he has to ride the Elevator to.

This story was formatted in 15 paragraphs, and these paragraphs represent 15 floors. Though I am not sure if he is counting the basement or the suspicious floor 15. But because it is pieced together in little bits it makes you feel as though they are each a floor leading up to the very top. The structure helps us understand the content and how Martin feels while he is in these little possibilities. The elevator encloses us and makes us uncomfortable. It also sucks us into the story, because we want to understand what the hell is going on. In a way we need to understand, because it is human nature to try and make sense of things. But we never get any sense in this story. We do get specks of it. Little glances of false hope, but they are only glances.

Then those elevator doors are such a strong motif in this story. Since that elevator holds everything that is Martin: His fears, his fantasies, and even his dullness. It is where he has his moments of clarity, where he takes a chance, and even where he dreams of fatal lust. “He arrives alone, at the fourteenth floor. He steps out of the old elevator, stares back into its spent emptiness. There, only there, is peace, he concludes wearily. The elevator presses shut (134.)” The elevator is his little enclosed universe, filled of an absurd amount of realities. The elevator is Martin and his imagination. Since just like the elevator he is filled of possibilities, but all of them are stuck inside him. Inside the little universe called his head. Without his universe he is nothing, and part 7 proves it. Since when he goes to the 15^th floor and exits his elevator he abandons all reality and enters a type of black hole.

And we never find out if any of these little stories are real. We just try to explain and believe them. We imagine that Martin, the geek, is just fantasizing all these possibilities. We can imagine that he is just a guy who wants to be legendary and greater than he really is. With this we can guess that he just wants to live in a world of narrative, but by doing this he is not living his real life. But really Coover might just be depicting different possibilities to one story. That is one of the glories of writing, because when we write we can go in any direction. Coover chooses to visit all of them.

Then comes the last little bit of this story. Where Martin does not use the elevator at all, but instead uses the stairs. And while going up those 14 flights of stairs he hears the elevator crash. We assume that he knew this all along, and that those strange fantasies were the premonition Coover references. After he hears the collision, he says “Inscrutible,’ smiles sadly, and goes on up those stairs. That was his moment where he realizes that all is useless. This makes him more human, because we all have that moment where realize life is shit. The moment we should all grasp on to. It is the moment where you can either decide to just quit or keep on climbing those tedious stairs.

But the author does not forget what he has told us before. He comes back in parts 11 and 13 to remind us that he is the reason all of this is happening. Without him we would not have a story nor even an elevator. He is the center of this plot, and the story is blooming from him. He wrote this story for a reason, and it was not to tell us to keep on climbing those boring stairs. We are not supposed to ask what is true because that is absurd since it is all false. It is all a lie. Just like all those stories we were told as a kid. Just like all those books we read. Sure we can find reason and truth in them, but that still does not make them real. All these characters were written, created, to fill a role. Coover may just be telling us to notice all these stories that affected us. Exposing all literature and telling us that our lives are surrounded by lies. Lies that are told in all these stories. Lies that were put there to convince us of something. Yet he telling all this in a story. Robert Coover is just reality kicking you in the ass the moment you think you understand something.

When I finished this story, that I kept on reading over and trying to understand, all I could do was laugh and think “How obscene.” Then I went back to reading.