Megan H first response to Borkowski

[Anonymous]

#655

David Borkowski confronts the reader with the details of this revelatory – and violent – event with a frank tone that contrasts the secrecy imposed over it throughout his life. His hindsight as a professor and as an adult (who considers himself to be a little more mature and self-aware than those who raised him) allows him to make connections between separate events along his timeline, which he posits in Chapter 1 as being his main (hypo) thesis of sorts:

“It seems as if everything before the shooting led up to that event and everything after the shooting led away from it, including my typing these very words…My life seems divided by that one incident. I guess that’s all it takes. One event can turn things around, if you’re lucky, rather than ass-backward, if you’re not…” (6).

From there, he posits, “Most of us can trace a certain point along our life-maps that can be seen as an end and as a start of who we are, of what we’ve become. Or what we could have become but didn’t. It’s a dividing line. Not quite a fork in the road—more like a knife’s edge” (6). His casual summation that life is not as dichotomous as we assume, between right and wrong, success and failure, bad kid, good kid, not only draws my interest but also compels my attention with its slightly didactic tone. His early reveal that the shooting left him “centered and whole” inside and “dislocated and incomplete” inside is echoed in the duality of the memoir’s voice between colloquial and more instructional language.

This balance of tension also enlivens his descriptions. The ethos of both his family traditions and of the community in Staten Island are rendered in a sharp but controlled voice – he’s freely critical of both but still a product of those worlds. He achieves this balance by discussing his family’s silence, their rejection of communication, through the contrasting momentum of his words on the page: “Achieving the nonexistence of disturbing experiences usually begins by one’s blocking them from the mind. Silence emerges from the absence of anything to discuss. That’s how my parents tried to raise me” (8). From openly criticizing Staten Island’s prejudiced and machismo-obsessed “homogeneous, narrow view of the world—imposed from without and enforced from within—” (71), to summarizing the effects of American bluster and consumerism on young fatherless boys, he freely speculates and deconstructs the influences of family and culture with the aim of deconstructing, in a way, himself.

So far, I most appreciate the piece for how it challenges my understanding of contrast and duality, of how I understand difference. My general impressions are about the duality of identity, memory and experience, the linearity vs circularity of history, and one’s inner sense of self versus others’ perceptions. The issue of Becoming, in some spiritual sense, and self-fulfillment is thread throughout.

[Website Services Admin]

#660

Megan,
This is really interesting. I enjoyed the chapters as I read them, but after reading your response I’ve developed a deeper liking – and appreciation – for them, because of the way you described it. How did you feel about his circular story-telling strategies? Were there times you felt it was strained? I talked about how I was kind of upset when he wouldn’t return to a question asked or a point he was making…how do you feel about this tactic?

[Anonymous]

#663

Hi Daimys – I agree, as much as I thought his circularity was interesting, I was definitely fatigued by some of the roundabout paths and circumlocutions around his point. It’s mostly why I sometimes thought he’s used to a structure of telling his point, like a thesis, and proving it through exposition, rather than showing his point through exchanges of dialogue (there’s little of it given, and it’s usually within a prose paragraph – a perfectly fine stylistic choice, but it runs of the risk of becoming narrative-heavy, which can lead away from a point).

[Author]

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