Re: The Laughing Man
WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Sun, 08 Feb 1998 14:51:16 -0700 (MST)
nudge:
"all that i can get out
of -the laughing man- is that it's a love story with a sad ending, and
vaguely parallel sub plot and an interesting third person narration"
I don't read it as a love story so much as a story of maturation. For one
thing, I think John gesudski is pretty ugly when his masked is removed,
and I've read it also as a story about good teaching/storytelling gone
bad. When the kid arrives home and is sent to bed I gotta explode since
that kid needs to be held and hugged and sung to!
Bettleheim is the man when it comes to linking narrative and learning to
understand our worlds and using stories to make our own maturation leaps,
but I don't want to over do it here...suffice it to say that the story's
narrator encounters two tough adolescent enigmas: seeing that your
godlike caretaker is human in the way holden says that people are always
ruining things, and seeing that relationships between men and women have
to do with more than baseball skills.
BTW, the specualtion that Mary Hudson may be pregnant adds to the love
story reading as well as the cycle of maturation we might build out of the
narrator-chief underground tunnel...will