Lily Briscoe

I don’t know what it is about this book. 500 plus pages of complete and utter absurdity, and yet I was hooked. I would sit down for an hour or two and decide to try to read a hundred pages, thinking I would fall asleep after fifty. To my surprise, I sailed through the pages almost with urgency. Maybe part of the reason was that I thought Ishiguro would finally throw us readers a morsel—a plot twist, a resolution, a reveal—but it never came. I admit I was impatient but kept reading anyway, just to see if any of this chaos could be resolved at all. But the other reason I kept plowing through the book was that it felt like a familiar dream. I could relate to Ryder’s frustrations, volatile emotions and disorientation when he was trying to navigate the city. Especially in the early chapters, I felt I was Ryder, because his story felt like so many incoherent dreams I’ve had before. I think the dream world is when the logical and the illogical intertwine. I hardly ever have lucid dreams, probably because the dreams, though incoherent, are just realistic enough to be possible. If things got too bizarre, I would probably realize I was dreaming. So my dreams are crazy, weird, frustrating, violent, but with a tinge of reality. That’s why I think that Ishiguro’s experiment succeeds. I may have been disappointed that we don’t get many answers or clarity to the story, but he’s created a dream experience, and rarely are there answers and clarity within dreams.

I am with an old lady who is on a scavenger hunt to look for clues to answer a logic problem. It is one of those "which statement is true?" questions, but I can't recall anything about it. She is driving the car erratically, swerving from lane to lane, almost hitting the other cars. After making an illegal wide turn, I spy a police car coming behind us. My heart starts beating faster, and I'm nervous that we're going to be arrested. However, he's not targeting us; he passes us by. The old lady drives alongside the cop car and asks him for directions.
Soon, we arrive at our destination. The beautiful grassy valley seems to be a national park campsite area. There are dozens of people around and many of them seem to be lost or stranded. Then I become disoriented and confused: what am I doing there? How am I going to get home? There's something sinister about this place, even with its natural beauty. Somehow I know to look in the other direction across the plains to the hills in the distance. I see a trapezoidal space ship zooming across the sky. There are some words floating right underneath the ship, but I can't read it fast enough, because soon the aircraft has zoomed over my head.
I yell to the other people telling them what I saw, but they are skeptical and uninterested. Then we hear a crash, then an explosion in the hills where the UFO came from. Everyone notices the plume of dark smoke that bellows from the area. Everyone starts to freak out, but I'm more intrigued than scared. There's a preteen girl with her mother at the campsite. A scientific nerdy Professor Frink type shrieks and says that she is contaminated and that her name isn't Elizabeth anymore; it's Allison. I decide to round up a couple of other people so we can expore the site of the explosion. The whole situation reminds me of September 11 and the huge pillar of smoke that swelled from the Twin Towers. Recalling this, I start to feel sad, angry, but even more determined to find out what happened. Then I woke up.

(I've been sitting on this dream for awhile, wondering whether I should share it. A few weeks ago, when I had the dream, I felt traumatized, even though it wasn't real. But now I can look back on it with more detatchment.)

The dream takes place in the backstage of a theater. I'm looking for my poems. They're not in the portfolio that I keep them in. The folder is empty. I notice there is a group of young men loitering around joking to themselves. They must have taken them. I stride up to the gang and ask them to give me the poems back. I am upset, because these poems are precious to me. I'm not a very good poet, so when I do compose a poem I put everything into it: my craft, my emotions, myself. I rarely write poems: I usually scribble things and then discard them. When I actually finish and edit a poem, it's a big deal.
The hooligans mock me and refuse to give me my poems back unless I have sex with each of them. I'm upset, but I agree to their demands. In my dream mind, this makes sense, because the poems are so valuable to me. I think that I won't be able to rewrite them, especially since I've already forgotten what they're about. It's grotesque logic, but I decide to relent, thinking that even though I'm practically being raped, the pain will only last a little while. My poems are irreplaceable, so if I refuse, they will be lost forever. I decide that I must sacrifice my body for my art. Just as the men approach me and I'm almost naked, the scene ends. Perhaps my unconscious blocked the most traumatic part from my memory, or maybe the sex never really happened. The next thing I can remember from my dream is feeling disheveled and humiliated as each of the men walk up to me and hand me a piece of paper. A couple of them even say thank you, which shames me even more. But I have the poems again! I clutch the papers in my hands and hold them to my chest. I feel like I'm about to cry, but I realize that I'm not able to. A couple of my family members walk by and ask me what I'm doing. I tell them that it's just something from school. When I woke up, I still felt ashamed and disgusted.

Ryder’s passivity is probably the most irritating and intriguing thing about the novel. He is constantly manipulated and insulted yet refuses to see and react to what’s really happening. The scenes with the photographers (who talk about him in front of him) illustrate this absurdity. As they continue to bash him, Ryder seems to have lost his first person narrative voice; he is practically a third-person observer.
Another scene that suggests that Ryder has difficulty asserting his identity is the part where his childhood friend wants to introduce Ryder to the snobby neighbors. Again, they talk about him as if he was not there. When Ryder tries to declare his identity to the women, he finds that is unable to talk. This is reminiscent of the dream paralysis that we’ve read about in Hartmann. When Ryder looks into the mirror, he sees why he cannot speak: “I saw that my face had become bright red, squashed into pig-like features.” It is also interesting that we never find out Ryder's first name.

I’ve been sprayed by skunks, chased by apes, and pounced on by canines, cats, rabbits, raccoons, and snakes. What usually happens is that the animal, friendly to everyone else, will jump on me and start biting my arm in one quick movement, like a snake. The sensation is more like a firm nip than a sharp bite. The hardest part is trying to get the animal off of me. I’ll usually have to shake it off or hit it so it will release its jaws.
Once I dreamed that a lion was about to bite me, but I kept his mouth from chomping down by keeping his jaws open with my hands. I didn’t know what to do next, because if I released my hands, he’d tear my flesh apart.
I’ve always been irrationally afraid of animals—all kinds, from fish to weasels. When I was a little girl, the neighbor’s dog stalked me. I found myself standing on tables because I thought the dog was going to eat me. Of course, this attracted the dog even more. I'm no longer afraid of dogs, but I can still remember what the fear and anxiety felt like all those years ago. My brain is just replaying those sensations in my dreams.

I feel that my rough draft didn't give a good picture of what I want to accomplish in my essay. I just typed up my research and didn't analyze it adequately. Most of all, I felt like I didn't know what else to say about a specific point. I know this is where I need to analyze a subject more thoroughly, but the words just haven't come out yet. I think this may be a result of fatigue. My topic interests me, but after writing fifteen pages and sitting in front of the computer for hours, my enthusiasm has waned. This winter break will give me a chance to reevaluate why my topic is important and what I want the reader to come away with in my essay. Most of all, I need to stop worrying that I may not be writing the most compelling and erudite arguments.

The fridge door was wide open, and I could hear the clanking of jars and bottles and the crinkling of plastic bags. I figured it was my brother, but when I rounded the corner I saw it was my dog rummaging through the refrigerator on his hind legs! He was upright like a human, and he was moving food packages around with his paws. "Mom! The dog's getting into the fridge!" "Yeah? So? He's hungry!"