Daimys – Response to Borkowski Ch. 1-4

[Website Services Admin]

#658

There are a few things that stuck out to me as I was reading the first set of chapters.

The first is the relevance of the scenes involving police officers. There’s this odd through the first couple of chapters that while he portrays the officers as these brutal, heartless men he’s thankful for them because it ‘changed’ him. It is only in chapter four that he directly states that the cops were terrible, but that the situation changed him. With everything that is happening now – the death of Mike Brown and Eric Garner – I’m interested to see what parallels can be drawn from his description of the shooting and the police officers and the rhetoric being thrown around about the police on the news. There are obvious differences – but I guess what I’m most interested in is the way he is able to portray the officers and still hold some credibility – even after committing petty crimes – while credibility is taken away from protesters.

In terms of building the story,sometimes he goes into these riffs, but never really comes back to the original moment. The one that stuck out the most for me was in chapter two, where his father asks him if it was true that the incident where he was taking the pizza man’s money wasn’t the first one. He goes on to talk about his friends and family and different moments, but never circles back to that moment in the car where his father asked him that question. It was particularly frustrating because there is hardly any development of him with his parents during these first four chapters, and I really wanted to see that scene play out. This conversation with his dad is really formative in terms of how Borkowski dealt with the shooting, but why mention this moment with his dad if he was never going to circle back to it?

The last thing that stuck out to me were his chapter lengths. It’s sort of arbitrary but I was interested to know why there are some chapters that were twenty pages long and some that were three. It seems that the chapters all work in this unraveling motion, where something happens that leads to another memory that leads to another – just some are longer and some are shorter.

[Sondra Perl]

#675

I think what you’re zeroing in on regarding the structure of the memoir is it’s discursive methods. The memoir definitely has a quality of orality to it. He incorporates a lot of informal language, asides, digressions, and he goes off on many tangents. I can see how this might be a frustrating quality–it reminds me of listening to my grandmother talk; she usually begins a really great story, and I’m very interested in what she’s saying, and then she wanders off in some other direction, starting a new story and never finishing the one she began. In a way, I think that Borkowski’s messy method corresponds to the messiness of his story. Real life often resists a linear progression. Instead we circle round, spiral up or down, and sometimes we go off on strange, unexpected tangents. And I think his narrative structure allows him to incorporate ambivalence and messiness into his story–unanswered questions resist a clear progression, and maybe his technique allows him to work within the shifting limits of his experience?

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