critical commentary II JACOB SACKS-JONES
This is a story centred on the epiphany of a young boy, a realisation that the smile he sees on an older girl is not really meant for him: an understanding that he is being deceived not just by this girl but by the society that has raised him. Like the droplet at the story’s start, he is not special: he is a member of a collective.The s mile, crucial to the story, is symptomatic of the superficiality of his world. Cheever’s dissection of American suburbia in ‘The Swimmer’ - its flaws and its monotony - inspired my own work’s backdrop: a city; I have attempted to create the idea of a definite lack of individuality (the houses are identical “brick matchstick boxes”).The story approaches the anonymising nature of an urban environment (Leonard is introduced through synecdoche that reduces him merely to a head), much like Cheever’s approach in ‘The Swimmer’. My short story is also an exploration of the rite of passage, told through two voices that are so closely interwoven the lines between them become blurred, offering a sense of confusion.This idea of mystery was inspired byMurakami,who frequently creates stories that are at first unclear: in ‘The Kangaroo Communiqué’, the reader’s understanding of the source of the text is continually shifting. In ‘Matchsticks’, there is an omniscient narrator who opens the story and intersperses the narrative with symbolic descriptions, including the raindrop at the opening (the pathetic fallacy employed draws parallels between this droplet and Leonard). The second voice is that of the thirteen year old boy, told through free indirect discourse (“The rehearsals were long; he would sit on a stool backstage”).These thoughts are worked into the text through ruptured linearity, inspired by Joyce’s ‘stream of consciousness’ – this creates the sense of the boy’s meandering
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