I am curious about a few of Borkowski’s details and assertions in these chapters. In Chapter 5, for example, when describing the night of the robbery, and all of the correlative dialogue surrounding it, between David and Dougie, and the pizza driver, I wonder to what extent Borkowski fabricated what was said, attempting to capture the spirit of the exchanges, in some semblance of verisimilitude, or whether he remembers the event so vividly that he recalls precisely what he and the others said, like pressing the “play” button to listen to recorded voices from the past. Clearly Borkowski remembers vividly aspects of that night and the whole experience of being shot, going to the hospital, recovering, etc., but I wonder if these are vivid visual memories or the remembrance of language. In the writing of memoir, obviously one must reconstruct past events, including conversations and other fleeting, ephemeral details; to what extent does/should the memoirist resort to fabrication or invention? This gets back to the whole question of the (un)reliable narrator, and autobiographical “authenticity” (whatever that means) or veracity.
On another tangentially related note, when he writes, referring to the fact that he is still somewhat baffled as to his own motivations concerning the robbery, “I’m quite aware of how subjectivity refracts and fractures vision, causing the past to be seen through rose-colored glasses or jaundice-ridden eyes. It’s simply too subjective, way beyond the postmodern idea of ‘scientific’ objectivity masquerading as subjectivity”(78), I wasn’t sure I fully understood his point. Might he expand upon this?
