critical commentary I Francis Aznaran
Inspired by Murakami’s ‘The Kangaroo Communiqué’and Joyce’s ‘Araby’, my short story explores the theme of isolation.Through a variety of techniques, primarily the metafiction of Murakami and the delayed revelation of Joyce, I hoped to recreate the interior monologue of one who is about to die. It begins in the style of Murakami, with an apostrophe – ‘you will have no trouble’. This recalls the first line of ‘The Kangaroo Communiqué’: ‘Say hey, how’s tricks?’ Both openings create ambiguity and confusion by lacking context. This serves to de- stabilise the reader, leaving them unsure of the nature, importance and addressee of what they are reading. The lines’ succinct and factual style also renders them redolent of an epigraph, and the pause which follows, denoted by an asterisk, suggests that the lines bear only minimal relation to the text which follows. They employ metafiction, since they refer to the piece as a whole, and along with the final reference to Plath’s poetry, this hints at the real intention of the speaker and the note. I read recently that Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ was one of the most common tracks to which people commit suicide. The piece is littered with clues, so that the delayed revelation of death becomes gradually more evident; ‘dirge’ is the first of these. Hence, while ‘Araby’ leads to its epiphany with emotive epithets – ‘a summons to all my foolish blood’, ‘pitilessly raw’ - this piece, in contrast, uses vocabulary selectively in order to alert the reader to the final revelation. The ‘sense of an ending’ and ‘knelled to a close’ refer both to the song and to the narrator’s life, while ‘vacant cheeks’ and the ‘breath’ which ‘wanders off, never to return’ imply a more literal loss of breath. The opening of the second paragraph is an example of non-
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