The
short fictional prose is a kind of narrative. Some people called it a short story.
In any type of
narrative, short story or others,
everyone is allowed to give an opinion that the story is
a lie or even a truth. Nevertheless in fact, every truth in
the story is only a lie only with some justification which is highly subjective.
Furthermore nowadays, people cannot separate the fictional from the
non-fictional.
In his short story, Let the Past Begin, Jonathan Carroll shows
there `is a wall between the narrator and his girlfriend Ava Malcolm. It shows
from the passage when
Ava narrated him about her “meeting” with a Yit – kind of like a fortune-teller
but more shamany- in Baku – Capitol of Azerbaijan.
”One
of the thing Lamiya told me was that I’m part of a curse.” (said Ava)
I slowly uncrossed my arms and then didn’t know what to
do with them.
The narrator could
not find an excuse to not trust her, yet he did not trust her anyway. The wall
is actually the ‘kind of length of space
mostly known as the space between two points or an interval of time’ (distance, OED). As we can see, the wall in this story is
temporal distance between Ava narrated the story to the narrator and Lamiya
told Ava about the curse thing. Moreover there is another wall between Ava and
the narrator, it is , the literal distance, which Baku is in a land far, far
away. The narrator should admit that the length of space is always being here,
there and everywhere. Either space distance or temporal distance. Whatever it
is, it can set the narrator apart from Ava and her stories. Furthermore the
narrator cannot prove if Ava’s story was a lie.
The story actually slowly points out the lie, yet the
narrator resists it and thinks that is a fact.
”I don’t know if you’re an idiot, a masochist, or the greatest guy on the
earth. You know people don’t get better as we get older-we just get more of who
we are. If Ava’s crazy now, she is only going to get crazier.” (said Eamon
Reilly)
“I know. But maybe she’s not.”
One
of some ways story tells the narrator that Ava Malcolm’s story is a lie, yet
the narrator turns it to be trusted lie since he trusts Ava no matter what
happened, moreover the narrator’s confidance looks like the justification.
The distance can be
also length that the main character make. As in David Lodge’s short story “
Changing Places” breaks the ice with Phillip Swallow went to the more remote
place of where he had been before, Rummidge. He was in the process of
exchanging posts for the next six months with Morris Zap. The man whom he never
had met and he was only known to each other by name. Phillip Swallow and Morris
zap were strictly separated by the length of space between Ruminidge and
Euphoria. They were also literally distincted in airplanes since one of them
was bored and the other frightened of looking out of the window. To tell the truth, the gap within them was
the stories that they hid and the stories they shared, it means that the lie
causes the distance. Actually there should not be the double distance,the
literal distance and the stories that they hid, between them, but they made it.
As fenny fern did
in her essay “Independence”. The
distances also made by herself or perhaps the world outside. The narrator built
the wall among her perception and the
world outside. When the sphere says
“Fourth of July” means Freedom, yet the narrator still feels so
stricted. Either she was too afraid of other’s opinion after she had done some
bold things at that time or the society did not even make chance went to her.
Anyhow, the kind of
length of space depends on the situation and by how the situation is
told. After that we can also identify the characters in the short stories. Carroll
told the personality of Eamon Reilly from the narrator’s perspective. In
narrator’s viewpoint, Eamon Reilly was
good looking and friendly man.
“Eamon Reilly was handsome and
sloppy. He seemed to know everyone, even the waitresses in restaurants.......
People cared him even he was being impossible, which was pretty often.”
The narrator also
described that Eamon Reilly was the mysterious man since he always carried a
diary book with him but no one ever saw what was in it. In fact, Carroll do not
only elaborate Eamon Reilly’s characterization but also the narrator’s. It
implies that the narrator is a positive thinker, yet in another situation
Carroll shows that the narrator is also a manic lover.
The moment after Eamon said he didn’t want to be a
father, it clicked in my mind that I did want to be the father of (to) Ava’s
child – more than anything else in the world. It was as simple as that. I loved
her and yearned to be her partner for the rest of my life if she’d have me. I
didn’t care if her child was Eamon’s and I didn’t care if there was a curse. Most
important, I didn’t even care if Ava Malcolm was as crazy as a fly in a jar. I
wanted to be with her and would do anything to make that happen.
The narrator also
looked like dependent person who could not live without Ava and Ava’s love.
Hence he looked like protective man that did not want to lose his girl and it
was too much. He was blindly in love with Ava and ignored the reality. Moreover
it showed that the narrator also was a quitter, since he did not want to accept
the truth if Ava Malcolm’s baby was not his.
Aside from the
narrator’s characterization, Carroll elaborated Ava Malcolm’s appearance by
what she did and dialogue with others. In this short story, narrator told that
Ava was fearless, self-confident, and impatient. Furthermore Ava was also a
reporter in extremely dangerous places. But she looked insane too since she told the story about the half alive and half dead
silent child from Lumiya, who told about the afterlife. In the other hand,
Caroll told Ava Malcolm’s characterization from Eamon and the narrator
dialogue. In that dialogue, Eamon Reilly directly said that Ava was crazy.
There is no requirement
and limit that the story was a lie or a truth. It will be hard to separate
which is a lie or which is a true when you follow the story because you will
think as the narrator, yet if you read the story without blend with the story
out, perhaps you can see the differences between the lie and the lie with some justification,
the distances and also the characterization of main characters. Distance also
can cause a lie divided into trusted and untrusted lie, moreover distance
itself is caused by the situation and how the situation is told, furthermore it
shows characterizations of the main character of the story. In the end, a lie
happens because of distance and it is causing distance too.
Nia
Saraswati
180410120100
peace love and gaul
