"Wounded" Response

       Through the frame of his friend Mikey’s self injury and following nighttime hospital trip, Jason flashes to and from his past experiences (each characterized by wounding or wounded people, from my perception), both as a child farming with his grandfather and his interactions with his bizarre and flawed neighbor Nick, eventually inhabiting multiple moments at once as the morning dawns. 

The characteristic of this story I enjoyed most was the author’s masterful use of visual imagery. This worked, I think, especially for a story like this, which transitioned quickly between scenes each characterized by a particular set of sensory details. Certain key images from each scene reappear, like the angled columns of sunlight and the feel of cold concrete of the porch, in the last brief scene, which I perceived as Jason, in his sleep-deprived and emotionally exhausted state, blending the subjective narratives of his own past. I also enjoyed the eerie parallelism in description between the wound on Mikey’s leg, with its natural diction as in “a yawning valley, flanked by two immaculate cliffs of flesh…” and the description of the land hewn by young Jason’s shovel, as “the incision that interrupted the smooth ground.” The more the reader picks up on similarities like these, the more these scenes separated by place and time seem to correspond. 

However, I think a little more emotional linkage between the scenes would be helpful, especially between the conversations with Nick and the hospital scenes. From my reading, I’m picking up that guilt is a major emotional element in the story, as it is mirrored at the beginning of the story, when the narrator says “I knew that he had been struggling with things, but this never seemed likely,” and at the end, when he wonders, “What could I have done to stop the bleeding?”. Is the narrator implying he should have picked up on Mikey’s mental troubles, and thus does this story become about his expiation of guilt? I can feel the element of guilt or wounded-ness in the scenes with the grandfather, at Jason’s inability to shovel and work to his grandfather’s standards, but not in the conversations with Nick. I like the haziness and quick jumps in place and time of these scenes, as those qualities characterize memory, and I don’t want the connection between them to be laid out explicitly, which would damage the tone of the story. However, the inclusion of just a little more introspective thought during these scenes would help make the linkages a little more clear.