The most unambiguously good memory that Ben shares in
Sag Harbor was from the chapter "Breathing tips of Great American Beatboxes." He finds absolute peace and happiness among the crowd at the concert, after finally getting in to Bayside. However, at the same time this chapter deals with his uncle's exile from his family that Ben sees as pure evil. I really liked the juxtaposition of these two memories in one chapter, the contrast made each memory seem, in a way, more vivid. This contrast is brought to the forefront by the way that Ben alternates between these two memories in his typical non-linear style.
I didn't know anyone. And it was ok. Something good was about to happen. I just had to wait. Weird trendoids surrounded me, fearsome geezers, drugged out wackos, but now we were comrades. We were all there for the same thing. The DJ hovered above us, throwing down his thunderbolts. He mixed in a segment of Debbie Harry singing "Rapture" and they screamed. Actually, I decided, I'm not dancing that badly at all. I thought, This is Good. No qualifier, chaotic or otherwise. Simply: Good.
I knew what Evil looked like. (263)
This passage describes with great clarity the capital "G" Good feeling that Ben experienced at the concert. However, as alluded to at the end of this passage, it is directly follow by the details of Uncle Nelson's situation. Ben's fond memory of the crowd at the U.T.F.O. concert is offset by his heart-wrenching memory of Uncle Nelson gazing longingly up at the house of his childhood. The most striking part of Ben's memory is when Uncle Nelson tells the boys what his own father had said to him so many years ago.
Uncle Nelson said, "He told me, 'don't set foot in my house ever again.' So I'm not." I stared straight ahead. "That doesn't mean I can't look, does it?" . . . The previous stops had been window-dressing. This is where he wanted to be. "I can look, right?" (266)
I found the juxtaposition of these two strong and contrasting memories very powerful, one the most good and the other the most evil. I think that the reason these good and evil classifications seems so pure and strong is because of the stark contrast provided by Ben's non-linear narrative. The resulting vividness of these memories made "Breathing tips of Great American Beatboxes" my favorite chapter in
Sag Harbor.
I like your idea of the memories making each more vivid by contrasting the other. I was a bit confused as to why Ben would smush such a random, emotionally-opposing memory in with another. But it did highlight the feelings of each, and ended up working well to make each seem more vivid.
ReplyDeleteNice post. Reading the chapter I thought it was really interesting the way he put the story of his uncle into the chapter, like a little interlude. It was so weird to contrast these two scenes which cause such different feelings.
ReplyDeleteI found this to be a very interesting contrast also. Uncle Nelson made me very worried for Reggie, I didn't want him to end the same way, and it looked like that was where it was going. I didn't see the interaction with Uncle Nelson to be as negative as this though, I got the impression that Uncle Nelson and Benji had a good time together, and that it was a positive interaction, even though there were negative things involved.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point, I didn't mean to cast benji's time spent driving around with his uncle in a negative light, just Uncle Nelson ostracization from his own family.
Delete"Evil" is such a strong word for Nelson's exile from his family home, and there are maybe shades of Benji's emerging sense of distance from his own father here. He may or may not be going in an "Uncle Nelson" path--from what we can surmise in his narration and its occasional references to his present state, he seems to have his shit together more than Nelson does. But at this point, he sees Nelson as someone who is too wild for "their classification system," and Benji seems to admire this independence and lack of caring on some level. Family in this novel is something to escape--think of Elena telling him to "get out" while he can--but Nelson shows the sad underside of this dynamic, as he's "gotten out" but now isn't allowed into the family home. The "evil," in Benji's view, seems pretty clearly to be on the side of the father.
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