Richard Selzer's excerpt from Confessions of a Knife stands among the most unique memoirs we've
read this semester. It's uniqueness makes it one of my personal favorites. The
first time through, however, I wasn't too sure about it. The beginning felt a
bit odd to me. I suppose that's as good a place as any to start dissecting this
piece.
Selzer drops more clues about the direction of his memoir in
the second mini section. He writes about the footbridge, "to walk across
this footbridge was a very foretaste of Heaven. Had it something to do with
death? So many children died in Troy in the nineteen-thirties. Tuberculosis,
they said. But I suspect that monstrous irresistible footbridge" (101). We
get the sense Tuberculosis, or maybe just premature death, is going to play a
role in this memoir. He furthers these morbid thoughts by reflecting on death,
itself. "And so much handling of
corpses. To this day, it is the part of dying that I resent the most. This
making free with the body, washing it, combing its hair, flipping it over to do
the backside. Dragging it upstairs by its heels, perhaps, or kissing it. I do
not share a tribal taste for matters funerary. Still, it out not astonish us
that the survivors embrace and join not unwillingly in the rituals of death.
What more tangible proof of one's own existence? He yet live who bears the
pall" (101). Thank goodness for the introduction explaining Selzer's
background as a physician or this reflection would make no sense whatsoever.
Because of that bit of information, however, we get a glimpse into his adult
mind. Certainly physicians view death differently than medical field outsiders.
It makes you wonder if the death he saw as a child aided his father's push for
medical school.
The third section is where I was sure the memoir should have
started. I mean it's where I would have started if it were my memoir. But
that's why Selzer gets paid to write and I don't. Either way, his opening line
in that section says, "Bobby Kinnicut was twelve when he drowned in the
river" (101) Already things are coming together. The significance of the
river section and the death section are already coming into focus. Through
Bobby's death, and the adults' reactions to it, we see how Selzer's childhood
community views the river as this living, breathing entity. His mother said,
"how i hate that old brute" (102). Selzer's reflection on this
comment is amazing. He captures the innocence and creativity of youth when he
says, "Billy and I didn't really believe that Bobby was drowned in any 'all
gone' or 'nevermore' sense" (102).
This memoir took me a while to get into it, and even so, I’m not sure if I fully enjoy it. What I do enjoy most, are bits and pieces of his sentences. You can feel the character, in my opinion. Some of my favorite lines are: “About the wake, three things: the coffin was open. We didn’t look at each other. Barry’s sister did a lot of coughing.” (107). The “we didn’t look at each other” and the mention of the coughing, resonates from the previous section on page 104 about the fight Barry and Richard were in. I think it’s a powerful thing to mention, which obviously he took notice on, therefore it still means something to him.
ReplyDeleteAnother favorite line earlier on in the piece as second paragraph on 102 starting with “As though catching the show…” This is so insanely powerful, I reread it, and had to meddle with it for a while. Haven’t we all felt like this at some point? A sort of “Oh, if I do this, then that entire situation didn’t happen” though you know well that it did and you can’t go back and change it. I think that is an on going theme with this piece—wanting to change something, but not be able to.
A part I enjoy about the beginning on page 101 with the middle paragraph “There was so much death in the town” which acted like a premise before his paragraph about Bobby Kinnicult. Selzer seemed to have done the reflection before the action, which I think is an affective way to present the situation.
I found Richard Selzer’s selection from Confession of a Knife to be creative and more unique than the other selections we’ve read thus far. The opening line sets the theme and tone for the rest of the piece: “A river casts its influence over those who dwell upon its banks” (100). He makes references to other well-known rivers in the world and how they all have some kind of influence on everyone’s life, whether it’s how they provide nourishment or how they resonate with the energy in every day human life. Selzer follows that intro with a story about how his childhood friend drowned in a river, yet he could not bring himself to believe that the river did it since he held it to such high standards for the community and society. The unique part of this memoir is how he involves multiple stories to make his point and show how he’s grown as a person. And he always introduces these stories with some kind of other reference, i.e. the river leading to the drowning story, the lineage of the Troy men being good fighters leading to Selzer’s first fight. Then he ends the passage with a paragraph about the river again. The river, like life, has to end somewhere or repeat somehow and he makes that evident/cohesive when talking about how he still wakes up thinking about Bobby Kinnicut.
ReplyDeleteRichard Selzer begins his excerpt from Confessions of a Knife by discussing rivers, which are used to tie together all the different events and reflections being described. I like how Selzer's mother describes the Hudson river as an “old brute,” how Selzer suspects that the river is why the men in Troy fight, and how the people who live around the river are suspicious of the “ill to come." Selzer makes the Hudson into this dangerous yet mysterious and captivating thing that has a major effect on the people of Troy. I also like how Selzer opens up the section about his friend Bobby's drowning with the declarative sentence, “Bobby Kinnicut was twelve when he drowned in the river.” He opens with it after paragraphs of dense reflection, and I found it to be very effective. I also think Selzer reflects nicely from a child's perspective. For example, he thinks that Billy isn't really dead; instead, he's “become a river nymph. Wearing fish at his nose, scratching the bottom for nickels and dimes." I also like how Selzer relates it to another time in his life: the time when he gets into his first fight with fellow schoolmate, Barry That passage not only relates to the previous passage about Bobby's drowning because they both deal with death, but because they both mention the river. For example, after hearing the news about Barry being taken to the sanatorium, Selzer's mom says, “Judas Priest! If it isn't the river, it's the chest. Is there no end to it?”
ReplyDeleteWell, I accidentally read Cynthia Ozick's memoir "A Drugstore in Winter" due to flubbin' up the page numbers. MEMWHOOPS. I guess I'll respond to that one first, anyway, for what it's worth. Ozick's contribution to the collection is what I imagine would come out of the average person when asked to write a memoir, despite her wordiness to the MAXXX; chopped, segmented episodes of life, that maybe generally theme, but usually not, and are linear only in that they lead to the person's current position. I am probably--No, definitely--completely wrong on this.
ReplyDeleteAlright, movin' on, let's take a sip o' this "Selzer" water: Richard writes fairly well for a COLD-BLOODED MURDERER. Jus' kiddin'. It's a bold-faced obviation to say (when you morph the meaning of the word), but this memoir is definitively a product of him. It meditates on subjects that would have held great importance or presence in his medical career; hospitals, injury, d-d-d-death. Additionally, pharm-speak is sprinkled all throughout, with various bodily fluids wildly spewing up in arcs to coat the story's. The whole section just strikes me as "medical". And not clinical; it's not cold by any means, but even in reading the bio it's clear that Selzer writes from what he knows. And what he knows is the M.D. life, straight-up; in-patient, out-patient, patience enough to write solid non-fiction. His memoir shows an obsession with life, untouched by death, that isn't at odds with the verve and invincibility of youth. (Even though Billy seriously died because Selzer whipped him in the throat).
Seeming to contradict yourself is in, F.Y.I.
DeleteI found this exerpt of Seltzer’s memoir very interesting; however, I felt like it read more like a short story than a memoir. It starts out really slowly, which is different than other memoirs we have looked at, and it is a full page and a half before we really get to see Seltzer. At the same time, this slow paced opening does a lot to characterize the town that Seltzer lives in, and get us into his boyhood mindset. I thought the image of the river pulling at him, and the power of rivers, was a very strong metaphor that helps us see through his child’s eyes. I also like how he uses this idea to frame the narrative, beginning with it and then coming back to it in the last two paragraphs. I think that there could have been more reflection in this piece, especially considering the amount of heavy topics, namely death. Though he touches on his child’s understanding of death, he doesn’t really say how it affected him.
ReplyDeleteMy very first thought as I started to read Selzer's piece is that it opens like a movie. I heard that deep narrator beginning to tell us about this river and its mysteries. I was suckered in from the get-go. But then the voice droned on... Typically--in the movies, at least--the narrator says a few sentences and then comes the action, the story. But Selzer doesn't go there. He continues to reflect on this river and the town of Troy. He is a beautiful writer and I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, but I wish he would've broken up the pieces of reflection a little more and permeated it throughout the piece instead of giving it to us in a big chunk in the beginning. I had written questions in the margins such as "Where's the action?" and "Where is he in this scene?" I wanted more action.
ReplyDeleteWith that said, Selzer is the Master of Metaphors. I do believe this is why I so enjoyed the piece. His writing really is riveting, and it's the metaphors that kept me glued. I think those of us who call ourselves writers can appreciate this one: "It is not a sigh of sorrow or satisfaction, but rather like a mark of punctuation, a semicolon. It means that a certain point has been reached. With a single punch or kick, one of the men has gained irreversible ascendancy over the other. When you hear that sigh, you can tell who is going to win" (103). My personal favorite was this one: "As though I had wrestled with an angel all of whose mass and strength had left his body and entered mine. But the price for such grace was that I must behold the angel as he lay dying, be marked forever by his vanishing" (106). It was his subtle way of slipping in a metaphor, a picture, that kept me reading.
The format of this memoir intrigued me a bit as it is presented much differently than most memoirs we have studied. Selzer begins the memoir uniquely, describing rivers to the reader, setting a scene but not a scene for a story but of a river. This shows us that rivers will most likely have an impact on the rest of the memoir. After a double line break, he then goes onto a short section about death and the things that he associates with death and what he does not like about it. Again, he describes it well and lets the reader inside but we still have yet to actually be introduced to a character. Finally, Selzer goes on to a story and introduces characters. In doing so he does not place us in time and space very well. I don’t know that this is wrong but this style seems to contrast the type of memoir we are trying to produce.
ReplyDeleteOne other thing I found interesting was how he went about introducing the story of Billy’s death. “Bobby Kinnicut was twelve when he drowned in the river.” Selzer comes out and flat out tells us that his brother dies and then tells us the story. I found this interesting because I thought it would have been better, as a reader, not to know what was going to happen. With his two short introduction discussing rivers and death one could assume that it was coming but it could have been a tool to keep the reader going, wondering what was going to happen and who was going to die.
I found that Richard Selzer's “Spoils of Troy” to be a very interesting read and interesting take on a memoir. It took me some time to get into it because I felt that everything sort of bounced around all over the place without any real connections. However, I felt that using the river analogy to connect all of the stories together was very interesting. I like the way this is done especially with the first section with the introduction of the river and Troy itself. This creates a sense of theme as well as establishes some background on the location that we are about to enter into with his story. As many of you have pointed out, declaring that Bobby had drowned in the river before the actual telling of the story establishes an interesting narrative technique. Selzer is able to point out what the event was right from the beginning and then is able to follow it up with the telling of the story with a great deal of reflection. He does this again by introducing how the men and boys of Troy tend to be violent people and even describes how they fight, followed by Selzer's fight with Barry. I did enjoy the ending of the memoir with the return to the river. I enjoyed how in returning to the river with his end paragraph. He is terrified of the place, but knows that he cannot escape his past. I felt that this ending section brought the piece together fairly well because he glories the river and its energy in the beginning, while in the end he demonizes it knowing that he cannot escape its embrace. While his theme is very strong, I felt that the strongest aspect of the piece was the way Selzer describes and reflects with very well written language. A very strong example of this is when Selzer visits Barry in the hospital. He states, “ I made no further attempt to talk, merely stood there watching the boy...Like a Muslim dervish all lapped in his djellba, who turns his face to the wall when he is ready to die” (106). I felt that this passage exemplifies Selzer's way with words very well.
ReplyDeleteThe structure of Selzer's memoir felt great to me. Based around nature, the river and the life that lives around it and because of it, he tells his tale in a way to feels very tied to the world that he exists in. Reading the image of death delivered through the point of view of a child I was struck by Selzer's ability to inhabit the mind of a child in such a dark moment, and yet finding the levity in a child's thought that if you pulled out the shoe his friend would remain attached. It is both a terribly sad thought and one that truly allows to see from the point of view of Selzer's character.
ReplyDeleteWhen it jumped ahead to the men of Troy, it in many cases would have felt very abrupt. But the way Selzer writes feels so intelligent and conversational at once, I feel like I might be listening to a smart man who has a few beers, and decides to tell me what he knows about life. This is not a bad thing. Selzer also keeps the story focused on the river, creating a theme that allows him to ramble off his orignal story and maintain structure.
I really didn’t like this story. It felt very disorganized. He starts talking about the river, then about this footbridge, and then about Bobby (who, by the way, we never hear about again), and then finally gets into the actual story. I know that this is just one tiny section from his larger work, but I think that some background on these story fragments would have helped me as a reader.
ReplyDeleteOne thing about this piece is that a good portion is given to reflection. While I enjoy this, because I think it adds something to a memoir, so much reflection in the beginning of the piece is a bit confusing. I had no idea where (besides near a river) the story was taking place; I had no sense of time or place.
What I found particularly interesting about this piece was how Selzer uses the river and the footbridge. He begins with the river, which he talks about frequently through the piece. Selzer also talks about this footbridge, which in the beginning he sees as “a very foretaste of Heaven” and then in the end, he runs from this bridge. I felt like the river was the only thing holding this excerpt together.
I found the opening of the story, with Selzer musing on the river and how life seems to grow around it, similar to Eiseley's memoir and his connection to nature. However I feel like Selzer created a metaphor that was easier to understand with more reflection compared to Eiseley, who I felt lost the reader in the deep philosophical reflections. I could connect Selzer's reflection of the river to how he felt about his hometown of Troy on the Hudson River.
ReplyDeleteOne part of the memoir that stuck out to me was line after Bobby has fallen off the bridge, and they attempt to reel in his shoe. Billy says "I'll catch it...with my fishing line.Don't worry Bobby... Here I come." Coupled with Selzer's reflection on it, I found it to be very heartbreaking because it capture the children's innocence; they truly believe that reeling in the shoe will save him because they cannot fully grasp what is happening.