Capturing Speech in Salinger

The most artistic thing about last night’s reading of A Perfect Day for Bananafish, was, to me, the way Salinger captured dialogue. We talked about this in class as well, but even before, I thought it was amazing how fluid and natural the speech found in the story was.

Throughout Muriel’s conversation with her mom, we see several distinctive ways of making the conversation more realistic and fluid. The first one I noticed was that Salinger italicizes certain syllables of words, the ones people actually emphasize, instead of the whole word. This helped me to better recreate what Salinger’s vision of the conversation was, reading it more like the characters would have said it. This kind of emphasis helps readers draw more conclusions, and get a better sense of what kind of attitude a character may have, as opposed to Hemingway’s style that leaves everything to speculation by just giving the bare facts of the matter. I really enjoyed this kind of dialogue, as it helped to put me more in the mindset of the characters, which I really like in stories.

The second way Salinger really made conversation come to life was by replicating how speech is thrown back and forth between two people in actual conversation. Muriel and her mother rarely let each other complete their thoughts, and they often change the topic without seeing the other topic to its end. This, when you think about it, is so much truer to our actual speech patterns than depicting conversations as one sentence, then another, then another. One topic, then another, then another. No! We’re constantly wanting our voice to be heard and jumping forward or backward to previous or new topics. I love the realistic aspect of Salinger’s writing in this way, because it puts the reader in the mindset to find everything else realistic as well.

What did you guys think of this kind of style? How does it work for you in contrast to the very bare, factual presentation given by Hemingway?

In a Soldier's Shoes

“You are a United States Infantryman.” One sentence into the story When Engaging Targets, Remember and the reader is already sucked into the setting of the story, placed in the position of a real soldier in a real unit in a real war. That, to me, is what makes this story in Fire and Forget so memorable.

Gavin Ford Kovite decided that the most effective way to express his experiences from the war in Iraq was to write his story in the choose-your-own-adventure style. I think that this decision worked really well for what I think Kovite was trying to do. As is inherently true with this type of story, the ending is not set in stone. It is dependent upon what you deem to be the wise choice at an earlier point in the story. Thus, somebody could end up injured or dead because of your poor choice. In writing like this, Kovite is giving us a better sense of what it means to be a soldier than if he just told us which choices he made and what happened because of them. He gives us a choice, so that the consequences all rest on us, so that we feel responsible for the ending we experienced.

At least for me, it’s been really easy to judge characters while reading all these war stories. I think, Well, that was a dumb choice, it was obvious he should’ve done something else. However, after reading When Engaging Targets, Remember I feel more sympathetic towards characters, knowing that they were thinking about the consequences for all of the decisions they made, and realizing that I wouldn’t always know what to do in such situations either.

Another similar feature unique to this kind of story is that the reader can always go back and read the paths they didn’t choose the first time. I did this and saw what happened when you didn’t fire on the BMW and let it pass into the convoy. Though it is also necessary to leave the different storylines open like that for those who choose them the first time, I think it parallels another aspect of being a real soldier and making real decisions. We as readers can flip a few pages and see what could’ve been. Soldiers, on the other hand, have hours of free time to muse about the events leading up to a certain choice and to imagine what would have happened if you had made the other choice. The difference between a reader and a soldier is, of course, that the former is reading about realistic events and the other is experiencing real events.

While stories will always do their best to make us feel like the latter, it will never be exactly the same. That being said, the choose-your-own-adventure style of When Engaging Targets, Remember came as close as any story to replicating that experience for me.