Re: The Laughing Man

Mattis Fishman (mattis@argos.argoscomp.com)
Mon, 09 Feb 1998 11:10:52 -0500 (EST)

Will, talking about The Laughing Man, writes:

>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!

   Will, you posted this thought before, namely how the Chief deserves
reproach for harming the children by destroying their hero. In your
curent post, you also call him ugly. This opened up a new way to look
at this story, almost with the narrator as the protagonist being 
hurt by one who cannot put his wards' needs above his own. I certainly
can hear this, especially in view of the ending and needing to be put to
bed. This turns the narrative of the laughing man into simply (well, I
don't really mean simply) the toy that is exhibited prettily, and then
snatched away undeservedly. I do not mean to put words into your mouth,
rather try to see the story from your perspective.

   I cannot see the Chief (and I give him his honorific intentionally) as
bad. To me the inner story of the laughing man parallels John's own
self image: an outsider (consider the very ethnic, west side, name) with
many fine, heroic (if not heroic, then outstanding) qualities - he did
almost become a pro ball player. His courtship of the white-bread, east side,
beautiful, Mary Hudson seemed very doubtful of success to us worldly
readers, yet to his loving band of "criminals", he cannot be anything
other than a success. When reality finally takes over, and Mary walks
away, John himself has taken a few bullets in the gut ("oh, I have done
better since" remarked Cyrano) and we watch his alter ego perish as fantasy,
however romantic, does not triumph. I think the narrator realizes this, hence
setting the story in the future, where he is able to look back on this
with a more adult understanding of the relationship and a true love
and sympathy for his Chief. I think the Children were stunned rather than
hurt by the sudden, sad end of the laughing man, and that they gained another
insight, perhaps unappreciated at the time, into the human frailty of
their heros, in the process of their maturation.

All the best,
Mattis (striking a noble, but quixotic blow for spurned boyfriends and
literary theorists everywhere)