“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.
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