question…What is love?’This contradiction emphasises the boy’s childlike nature by illustrating his confusion. Throughout ‘The Stare’, there is a struggle between the sexualised adult and the child inside, who just wants to be comfortable in his own skin and go home - ‘I want to go home really.’The unreliable narrator was inspired by Murakami. In ‘The Second Bakery Attack’ the narrator states, ‘I was either twenty-eight or twenty-nine - why can’t I remember the exact year we married?’This suggests he is not to be trusted entirely, much like the boy in ‘The Stare’. The reference to Top Gun - ‘Have you never seen Top Gun!? Danny DeVito doesn’t get Kelly McGillis. Tom Cruise does.’ - and the boy’s relation to its characters - ‘I can’t sweat. Does Tom Cruise sweat? No.’ - is metafiction; the boy recognises he needs to be like the characters from a fiction to achieve his goal, and his goal itself, the girl, is likened to a fictional character. This metafiction exposes the illusion of love and was inspired by ‘The Second Bakery Attack’; one of the first lines in Murakami’s story references other fictional work - ‘The pangs struck with the force of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz .’ Murakami uses metafiction to highlight the fantastical and illusory side of his story. Despite his romantic rhetoric, e.g. ‘I am in love’, the boy does not actually love the girl; he wants to use her as a rite of masculine passage, illustrated by the first line, ‘I am going to get the girl’ and later on the boy describes her as his ‘damsel in distress’.This objectification of the girl indicates his true feelings. The rite of passage was inspired by James Joyce’s ‘Araby’ - the boy says to Mangan’s sister, about the bazaar, ‘If I go,’ I said ‘ I’ll bring you something.’The boy sets off on a medievalesque romantic ‘quest’, but his tendency to see it as such sets him up for disappointment as the reality intrudes on that false ideal, much like the boy in ‘The Stare’ ending with the admittance ‘I’m always alone’. ‘The Stare’ ends with the epiphanic moment when the boy pulls away from the mirror, revealing the nature of his ‘conversation’.
17 100
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker