Subject: Re: Teddy killed booper [was Alexander's Salinger Biography]
From: Benjamin Samuels (madhava@sprynet.com)
Date: Mon Feb 28 2000 - 12:50:09 EST
----- Original Message -----
From: <AntiUtopia@aol.com>
> I don't think it's so much ambiguous as oblique. In other words, it's
> something you could easily miss on the first read, but wouldn't miss on
the
> second or third, especially if you took your time to think about what was
> going on. Makes me think Hamilton read the story once, quickly, like you,
> and came to the wrong conclusion.
I had the opposite experiece in a way. I had posted a question about this a
while back and I'm glad to hear some opinions on it. In my first reading it
was clear to me that Teddy dies in the end. On subsequent readings it seems
much more ambiguous. There are some hints that Teddy writes to himself
(quoted from memory) about how it's silly for him to even think about it but
it would happen either today or some other specifc time in the future. Then
we have that man asking him about other dates of death he has predicted.
Then he makes up this scenario about diving into an emty pool (right? is my
memory foolong me here?) and then after he leaves the conversation with that
man we stay with the man who hears a scream echoing as if inside four walls.
The idea that he dies is definately put in the text but on my last reading I
had some doubt about it. I felt the scream was coming from a person falling
in the empty pool, thus the echoing and there was some descriptive element
there that suggested it might be a girls scream, like his sisters. So,
maybe it was his sister that had fallen into the pool. OK, very speculative
and doesn't really make sense. Maybe the scream is no reason to suspect
anyone's dead. But the reading where he does die is the one that seems most
likely to me. Which leaves te question why the ambiguities?
Love,
Madhava
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Mar 02 2000 - 19:30:24 EST