Themes from American Literature

                There are a few themes in this book that could be representative of American literature. The first is the idea of freedom, that one can choose their own path and be their own person, as Arthur decided to be more black than white and Dylan tried to be a superhero, Aeroman. But also part of it was the cultural divisions, that despite the progress being made, people were still divided on race and gender, and to be different was not always good. The book also addressed the views on violence, sex, and drugs that the young generation got from the new media, from music and television.

Images

 I felt like o

ne of the big images in the book was Abraham's "movie". His set of frames that, seen individually, seemed to have no difference from one to the next. I related this to the passage of time in the novel; all of this time passes, and much of the time between events is unmentioned, such that it gives the impression that from one moment to the next, it's hard to tell any difference until some major shift happens, so the book skips from one event to the next with little pretense.

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 I felt that the flying man's silver ring was another important image. It seemed to represent a sort of freedom, of stepping beyond one's self and reality and doing things you never thought you could, of being allow

ed to be someone else and forget yourself. After giving his ring to Dylan, the flying man, Aaron, seemed to remember who he was, as if the moments he had the ring on were an unrealistic blur. He wondered where it had gone, but could not remember giving it to Dylan, and so it seemed he forgot himself when he wore it, making it a thing of power but also of danger.

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Also important was the distinction between white and black. In the beginning of the novel, when Dylan was young, it didn't seem to matter. But as he got older, he began to be singled out, and it became more important that he was white. Arthur attempted to escape this by acting black, and in doing so he ended up not going to Stuyvesant, which seemed to have a considerable white student population. Dylan was bullied and picked on by other people, and so he began to hide and cower before others.

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Girls also seem to be important to the novel. Being interested in them is treated as a passage of growing up, something normal and to be embraced. Sex is looked at by the characters as something that feels good and is fun, it seems, but one didn't necessarily even have any experience with it. It was a sort of honor thing, something that made others jealous of you and made them admire you.

The End

                Another rarely mentioned character in the book is Barrett Rude Senior. Mingus’s grandfather is highly religious, and fears that his son is consorting with the devil, because of the sounds he hears coming out of his son’s room. However, he’s also accused of sleeping around, which he tries to justify by saying that he was giving them the blessing of God.

                Dylan is hanging at Mingus’s house, finalizing a deal the two of them had for Dylan to buy Mingus’s comic books, and the flying man’s ring. Barrett Rude Junior invites the two of them downstairs to watch a football game, and they acquiesce. At Barrett Rude Jr.’s bidding, they all get high, watching the football game. Suddenly, Barrett Rude Senior busts into the room.

                He begins to argue with his son, and finally calls out Barrett Rude Jr. as being twisted, stating “I praise God every day your mother never lived to see it.” Barrett Ruse Jr. cracks at this and attacks his father, but lets him go. Barrett Rude Sr. disappears downstairs, but everybody is shaken by what happened. Barrett Rude Sr. comes back upstairs, this time with a gun. Mingus yells at Dylan to go home, and Dylan runs outside and onto the street.

                The chapter ends with “He was on Dean Street, teetering on a square of slate, when he heard the shot.”

Musical Guns

Dylan is now practically the secretary of a band, called “Stately Wayne Manor”. “Dylan, he’s like Manor’s fifth member, he knows their tiny set by heart, hand-letters their posters, listens in confidence to their girlfriends’ grievances.

“Sometimes makes out with their girlfriends.

“Might one day get laid by their girlfriends.”

Not the average secretary. He’s at a battle of the bands competition with his band. There, he reveals that he has a new crush, Liza Gawcet. Dylan’s nervous about getting her alone to talk to her and hang out with her for once, but at one of his bandmate’s insistences, decides to take her to meet a local drug dealer. He goes alone with her to the drug dealer’s apartment, with his bandmates and their girlfriends not far away, and suddenly thinks twice about it because of the decoration. Suddenly, three men bust into the room, one with a gun. Dylan, Liza, and Tom, the drug dealer, are terrified. Dylan recognizes the man with the gun. It was a bully who’s been reappearing throughout the novel, seeking revenge for something Rachel did to him before after he stole Dylan’s bike. His name is Robert Woolfolk, and he’s slowly made his way up to being a common street thug. Robert recognizes Dylan, too, and is torn, because while he had threatened on several occasions to kill Dylan, he didn’t feel he could in front of his friends, who now knew that the two of them were acquainted, that Robert was associated with a white boy. Robert leaves without doing anything, but Tom yells at Dylan to get out, and Liza is terrified of Dylan too. Dylan is immediately sorry he decided to take Liza up to the drug dealer, but it’s too late.

Legal Intervention

                Mingus was arrested during one of his solo “Aeroman” escapades, as Dylan discovered when his father showed him the newspaper. Dylan hunts Mingus down, because he was released, concerned mainly for the ring and for the fact that he had never before really flown in Brooklyn. When he finds Mingus, Mingus is stoned in his house, and doesn’t seem all that concerned about what had happened. The cops apparently thought Mingus had jumped out of a tree, and perhaps he had; I’ve been wondering if their thoughts that they were flying were just an illusion, conjured by their own belief that the ring was granting them powers of flight.

Arthur is there too, and for once he doesn’t seem to be worshipping Mingus, but rather making fun of him, proud that he can do so to a black kid and not get beaten up. The three of them got stoned, and that was the end of it.

Stuyvesant

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Toxic Fumes

                Dylan decides to visit Mingus, without Mingus’s new white shadow, Arthur. The first thing mentioned when Dylan is in Mingus’s room is Rachel, Dylan’s mom, how marijuana was her “totem fume”. Mingus’s room is filled with the fumes of marijuana, and Dylan first fakes smoking, but then he too begins to get himself high. After they discuss music from various artists, Mingus inquires about Heather, and at first Dylan is reluctant to say anything about her, but then relents and says he gave her a back rub. Mingus doesn’t believe that it ended there, and keeps pestering Dylan about it, until Dylan decides to demonstrate to Mingus what happened by giving him a backrub. He admits, during it, that he groped her, demonstrating that as well, but then lies and says that she let him get in her pants. He doesn’t, however, lie so much as to say that she let him have sex with her, but he does lie that she gave him a blowjob. Suddenly they’re giving each other handjobs, and the entire scene is very awkward, especially when Mingus’s father walks into the room, though he either just doesn’t care about what his son does or is too stoned himself to care.

                In the next scene, introduced suddenly as is characteristic of this book, with little lead-up but rather a sudden shift in setting and events, Dylan is walking down the street and is suddenly harassed by two black boys. Then Mingus flies down and hits both of the bullies in the head before flying back up. He’s wearing the Aeroman costume, though he thinks it’s “Arrowman”. He succeeded in doing something Dylan never had, and all because Dylan, being white, was better as bait than as the hero.

Pretending

                Now that Dylan’s back in Brooklyn, the reader can see how the relationship between Arthur and Mingus has progressed. Arthur practically worships Mingus, and supports him in everything he does, following him everywhere. Before, Arthur seemed content to be his stuck-up self. Now, he adds “yo” into every sentence at least once, using a lot more slang than he used to. All I can think is that to see him in real life would be humorous, because earlier in the book it was stated that he was clearly white, and now suddenly he’s overdoing his black kid act. Arthur also, in Dylan’s absence, did many of the things in Mingus’s company that Dylan would normally have done, like tagging.

                Dylan doesn’t seem to be too eaten up about this. He’s too excited to take Aeroman to the streets and try flying from building to building like the flying man before him, and fight crime. He lurks the streets of New York looking for crime, but only succeeds in scaring a young woman, who he had been following because he thought her susceptible to crime and worth keeping an eye on, to make sure nothing happened to her. He didn’t seem to realize that her terrified running through alleys was caused by himself following her. He found no crime that night.

A Whole New World

                Suddenly, upon the coming of chapter 11, Dylan is in Vermont with little pretense. In the beginning of the previous chapter, which, like all of the chapters, was very long and included so much that in that time it was easy to forget what had happened, it was mentioned briefly that Dylan was going to Vermont. Now, however, you’re overwhelmed by new names and new images, of other white people making fun of Dylan for once, or at least Buzz was. Dylan is living with the Windles family, who, in contrast to the city, live in a very rural world.

                Dylan really likes the Windles’ daughter, Heather. That much is made clear in the beginning of the chapter. He’s 12, and she’s 13, so it seems that they’re at an age when they probably shouldn’t have so many of these feelings anyways. But throughout the book Dylan is shown to be mature for his age, and very much so, so perhaps it’s not so strange after all. She’s curious about Brooklyn, so he tells her about it, and in an offhand thought of Dylan’s it’s revealed that he made a costume, presumably because of his new flying ability.

                When they were eating ice, they laughed about how their lips were numb so that they couldn’t feel anything, and suddenly they kissed. It wasn’t described in much detail, and right after they didn’t seem to make a big deal of it. But then, almost right after, Dylan began to give Heather a back rub, and suddenly began to grope her. When he moved his hands down to her shorts, though, she pulled away, and then they rode bicycles together without another thought of what happened, and so it’s impossible to tell if they really felt anything at all in the act.

                He later showed her his costume. He was to be Aeroman, the flying superhero. He wanted to show her his powers, but she expressed her dislike for the costume and left before he could show her. After she left, he flew over the Windles’ swimming pool, again and again.

                Dylan’s suddenly back in Brooklyn. Heather never appears again.

Sudden Changes

                Following when Dylan obtains the flying man’s ring, he offers to introduce Arthur Lomb to Mingus. Arthur is strangely excited about this, and when he does meet Mingus, he is uncharacteristically shy and awkward around him. Arthur is a bragger and a gloater, trying to impress everybody, and it’s interesting that now he should feel humbled, though perhaps it’s the fact that as a white boy, he was always terrorized by black kids. To meet one in peace would be to obtain some mark on himself that would show others that he was cool with black people and they were cool with him, or so he seemed to think, though it never worked that way for Dylan.

                They start to play stoopball, and it’s apparent that Arthur is not athletic in the slightest. He keeps getting yelled at, and every time he acts sheepish and apologizes.

                Important in this is that during the game, when Dylan jumps to catches the ball, he jumps higher than normal, lands gracefully, and it is described as “flying”, to the awe of the other kids on the block. Arthur is sour at this attention, having wanted it for himself, but it is clear to the reader that Dylan got something from that ring, that he was able to do more than ever, and suddenly the book has a very strange supernatural feel, although up to this point it had been, for the most part, realistic.

The Flying Man

                Earlier in the book, Dylan looked up at the rooftops of the buildings above and said that he saw a man, jumping from rooftops impossibly, flying. Now the flying man has come back, except he has fallen to the ground, and is just another poor black guy on the streets, homeless, jobless, and penniless. He was likely all of these things before as well, but now that he is no longer “flying”, he seems to have lost all of the richness and grandeur that the ring once brought him.

                Dylan and Mingus are “tagging up” – scribbling Mingus’s tag, “DOSE”, on everything they can. Dylan had already tried to come up with a tag for himself, but could not think of any and so contented himself to perfect the artistry of Mingus’s tag (another thing I find symbolic, but I’ll think I’ll end up stuffing all of the symbols I can think of into one post later on). Suddenly, Mingus decides to draw his tag on the sleeping bag of the grounded flying man, whom the two of them are not even sure is alive, and then both run away after Mingus’s action.

Following this, Dylan and his father are traveling through New York, and Abraham sees the flying man, newly tagged. He knows that the tag is Dylan and Mingus’s, and after getting mad at Dylan, checks to see if the flying man is alive. They both thought he was dead, and are surprised to see that he’s alive after all. Abraham wastes no time in getting the flying man medical attention. Dylan finds himself in the man’s hospital room, and is told to look in a drawer. He finds the flying man’s identity, Aaron X. Doily, and a ring that the flying man wore. Without being told, he believed that the ring was the source of the flying man’s powers of flight.

Dylan got into comic books after bring introduced to them by Mingus, and so he associated the power of flight, or any power not naturally available to humans, really, to be something of superheroes.

In his first attempt to throw himself off of a building and fly, he chickened out.

Manhattan Rhetorics

“Two men, two fathers. Two fathers expelled from their lairs, headed to Manhattan for a change, dressed for a day threatening rain, having shaved their chins to make some nominal impression at their target destinations, tightened scarves with momentary vain glances at hallway mirrors before flushing themselves out of hiding, onto the street. Two fathers each sighing as they plunge down stairwells to underground trains, to endure the shoulder-jostling crowds which mill on platforms and pass through the jerky opening doors, then hang wearily from straps or clutch poles in the blinking, grinding trains. One carrying evidence, a black pebbled-cardboard portfolio with lace ties, the other empty-handed, his instrument his throat and lungs, carried in the valise of his chest. Two fathers ride a while on two separate trains, then, stations attained, Times Square for one, West Fourth for the other, two fathers again put shoe leather to pavement, out on the big island now, two fathers negotiating Abe Beame’s crumbling, deranged infrastructure in the year of Tall Ships. Two fathers blinking in confusion, each startled how reclusive they’ve become, drifted into the Dean Street solitudes, Brooklyn a mind-state peeling further from Manhattan each day, like continental drift. Two fathers briefly and involuntarily recalling other less morbid and sensitized selves as they move dazed through strobing faces in the late-October streets, two fathers each realizing he alone is distracted by a slide-show sequence of false recognitions – You! Didn’t you go to City College? Ain’t you Charles What’sisname? – among dulled millions trudging Manhattan daily, millions jaded out of the free-associated overstimulation. Two fathers shake it off, forcibly raise the thresholds of their own naïveté, get back to their twin metropolitan missions in the chill-now-beginning-to-rain. Two fathers bearing down, recalling their work-selves, their places in the world. Two fathers here after all for a reason, to do some business, no fooling around.”

                This passage is a good example of many of the rhetoric strategies that Jonathan Lethem uses in his novel. Much of the book follows the main character, Dylan, but it’s at passages like this when he backs away from giving names and instead gives you the perspective of a witness who knows nothing about the characters to this point that you get the most in-depth descriptions of the characters and what they do, as well as the setting. It’s also in passages like this that he uses the most rhetoric strategies to get across an impression of the situation. The reader, of course, at this point, knows who these two fathers are (Abraham Ebdus, Dylan’s father, and Barrett Rude Jr., Mingus’s father).

                The most noticeable thing here is the usage of the words “two” and “each”. He draws the parallels first, aided by his usage of parallel syntax and repetition.  It is only later in the passage, around the middle of it, that he begins to how each of them is different, in the things they carry and their destinations, but this moment is brief, and the sameness of their situations seems to draw an image of the sameness of New York, no matter where you are or what you’re doing. Each person is an individual among millions of other individuals so that their individuality is lost, and they seem to have some hivemind that causes all of them to just be part of one thing, a crowd, an idea.

                Another thing here is the imagery. Brooklyn is almost displayed as a battleground (“Two fathers each sighing as they plunge down stairwells to underground trains, to endure the shoulder-jostling crowds which mill on platforms and pass through the jerky opening doors”), and then the passage moves to showing that the battle is in the minds of the two fathers. The imagery also displays the sort of dull, morbid feel of the city, the rain adding to this feel, and with the millions described to be “trudging Manhattan daily, millions jaded out of the free-associated overstimulation” makes the city seem an inescapable place of misery.

                The frequent use of commas can also be seen in this passage. They are used to add a chronology to the progression of the passage, and to show how one thing leads to another, or becomes it.

Italia

Another character has popped in on the scene, and his name is Arthur Lomb, an Italian boy. He's the only other white guy in the school besides Dylan, and so early on Dylan recognized the dangers in allowing himself to become friends with Arthur; two white guys together would attract much more attention than alone. But Dylan was reading comic books in the library and Arthur, standing nearby, commented on the art in it.

Arthur is very studious. He would be out of place anywhere other than a school or some office. He and Dylan are only in middle school, but Arthur can challenge Dylan on intellect. He came from a private school, and he keeps telling Dylan over and over that the only important things were grades, because they would decide where Dylan would go to high school next year, and of course they should aim for the best. He even instructs Dylan to butter up to his science teacher in order to get a recommendation for the best high school, and at this point I finalized my decision that Arthur was just a snob.

Dynamic Duo

Now I know who the other main character of the novel is. His name is Mingus Rude, and he moves in to the neighborhood.

Rachel, Dylan's mother, kinda pushes Dylan to be friends with Mingus and tells him that the two of them will be best friends. She couldn't be more right.

But now is a good time to do a character study on the two of them.

Dylan is quiet and thoughtful. He doesn't say much, doesn't explore much, and he's very non-confrontational. He'll play with the other kids mostly because he has nothing else to do, his mother is determined he grow up on the streets as a true Brooklyn kid like her. He doesn't seem to notice the stillness of his life, but is rather content to be doing the same thing day after day. He cowers before bullies, lets them take what they want, do what they want to him, knowing that if he doesn't prostrate himself before them they'll keep beating him up. He's independent, reads a lot, and is very intelligent, but not very brave or curious.

Mingus has a sort of obsession with titles and comic books. He loves the idea of leaving him mark on things, being remembered. He knows all of the comic books and admires the heroes, wants to be more like them. He smokes weed stolen from his father (his mother left), and tries to act cool all the time. He has a habit of giving everybody ridiculous nicknames on the spot, and generally wanders around and does his own thing. He's very self-sufficient, and unlike Dylan, people don't seem to mess with him. He loves looking at the graffiti and writing left on walls and such, the nicknames people wrote on everything, decoding the nicknames. He has his own tag, "DOSE", that he starts to write too. He's very calm and chilled out all of the time.

Passage

This entire book thus far, a certain amount of attention is paid to the activities of Dylan's father, and the film he's making. It's said constantly that there is so little of a change from frame to frame, that neither Dylan nor him mother understand Abraham's obsession with it, but he thinks the stillness is part of it, the slow changes he makes to the film.  I find this rather symbolic, relating to the passage of time in the novel. It seems slow, because nothing much is changing, and yet it's all flowing together.

I also found out that Dylan is the white boy. He doesn't seem to be discriminated against too much, though, because he's always playing games on the street with a ton of boys from the neighborhood. I'm guessing this is set in a more contemporary time.

Mild Confusion

Thus far in the book, which is not far since I'm only a few chapters in, it's still been hard to figure Dylan out. He's the main character, he shouldn't be so confusing, right? Dylan is much more intellectual than any other child I've met; he's very analytical and seems to understand everything going on around him very acutely. The way he thinks, he seems to believe that all of the other kids around him understand the same things as him. I'm not sure if this is a flaw in the writing, or an intentional characteristic of Dylan.

It's also mentioned that everybody in the neighborhood Dylan lives in is either black or Puerto Rican, but it's never said what Dylan is. The short introduction to the book says that it's about a black kid and a white kid in Brooklyn, but I'm not sure which one Dylan is.  This will probably become apparent later, but it's just confusing now.

The time changing also makes the story hard to follow.  Instead of saying how much time has passed, Dylan expresses the change through landmarks, especially his progression through grades in elementary school. It all seems to blur together, and not much seems to really be changing.

Short Intro to a Long Book

(( Sorry about how long it took me to get these up; I have inconsistent access to internet at home, so I wrote the blogs and was hoping to be able to type them up sooner. ))

I found the first chapter really confusing. Opening with a chapter about "Two girls... the girls murmured rhymes, were murmured rhymes, their gauzy, sky-pink hair streaming like it had never once been cut." I was uncertain in this part whether it was a dream or not reality or if it was, in fact, real. Later I learned it was reality, because it was mentioned that the girls, Ana and Thea, moved away.

This is also the chapter in which the main character, Dylan Ebdus, appears. He's unusually bright for his age, a mere 6 years old. Not much is said about his mother, but his father is an artist who's working on making a film. His father use to paint, and Dylan's house is filled with nude portraits of his mother, questionable with a young child in the house.