Alright, so I know I already wrote a post about how great Bill is, but I came up with another key reason for his awesomeness: he can communicate. You are never left guessing about the tone or meaning of his words or about what he might not be saying. In this novel, there seems to be a premium placed upon people not being able to truthfully communicate with one another. There is very little in the way of honesty or directness in the conversations between the “friends” in this novel. Try to think of the number of honest conversations in this book. Now try to think of the positive, friendly honest conversations. Guess who’s involved? Bill. Just saying.
I can really only think of a few times when people are honest besides Bill. Jake and Brett are honest to one another at times, but it is always just talk of how miserable they are. Mike is honest to Cohn, telling him that he is a disgusting Jew. Besides these moments, everyone is either putting on a fake happy face, blatantly lying, or hiding real meaning behind jokes and sarcastic wit. Now I’m not gonna lie, I love a lot of the quick-fire dialogue in this book, but almost none of it is honest. I believe this ties back to how screwed up everyone is from the war. They feel ruined and cope with it by putting on these public masks and disguising everything behind humor. It is almost painful to read how shaken these people are.
1 comment:
Indeed, the quick-fire ironic dialogue often functions as a way to *eschew* honesty, to avoid facing feelings and consequences head-on. But Bill is quicker and more ironic than any of them, and yet, you're right--he manages to switch gears almost imperceptibly when he's with Jake alone. Even his joking around is full of palpable affection, the understanding that he really is helping Jake by taking his mind off everything.
I'd add, though, that for all the latent questions about his "reliability" as a narrator, there's something unflinchingly honest about Jake as a *narrator*, and it's connected to his stoicism. He's rarely ironic to *us*.
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