critical commentary IV Will Reid
‘Rain on the Velux’ is a story preoccupied with the insatiable hunger for relationships (and the shallow nature of these) in modern culture. Inspired in part by Murakami’s ‘The Second Bakery Attack’, which also deals with notions of society and the people within it feeling an ‘unbearable hunger’ for stimulation and love, ‘Rain on the Velux’ explores the ability of people in modern consumerist society to deal with changes to the balance of their measured and carefully curated existence and how we react if something were to upset this. The female character,who is an integral part of ‘Rain on the Velux’, is never physically present in the story and is instead reduced to a synecdoche, represented by a cigarette lighter adorned with the text ‘Indian Myth’. By having the girl introduced in this way I could reflect how she will only exist behind the gauze of memory and what little tangible physical legacy she has left. I also use this lighter as a synecdoche for the relationship as a whole, by describing it as ‘cheap and stupid’ and ‘disposable’. This was intended to link to the idea of how shallow relationships borne of brief infatuation (‘a brief yet beautiful flame’) can be in modern culture.This use of synecdoche was inspired by Graham Greene’s use of the same technique in his story ‘I Spy’. In this text, the main character’s father is said to ‘caress’ a packet of cigarettes in his shop. This emotionally loaded word attaches a sense of love to the cigarettes, and synecdochally displays his sadness over the impending loss of his family and way of life. I used a semantic field in ‘Rain on the Velux’ to reflect the main character’s feelings of emotional distress and pain through the use of words like ‘scratched’, ‘spat’, ‘bitter’ and ‘serrated’ – this was inspired by Greene. In Greene’s ‘I Spy’, the semantic field works
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