"Emergency" and "Home" Blog

After reading "Emergency" by Denis Johnson, I was somewhat confused.  I found his writing to be tricky to understand.  I did however, think that Georgie was an interesting person.  He says, "There's so much goop inside of us, and it all just wants to get out."(page 274) I felt he was trying to get at a deeper meaning than just the blood on the floor.  I feel he is trying to say that we all have so much information that no one knows about us inside that we just need to let it out sometimes.  When Georgie is helping with Terrence Weber and the knife accident, I felt this was the starting point of the blind issue brought up throughout the story.  When he says, "Your face is dark.  I can't see what you're saying"(page 276) this to me seems that Georgie is somewhat blind himself.  Wether it be real or a hallucination.  Another part I found interesting was when Terrence Weber said, "Not unless I die"(page 276) in relation to the doctor calling the cops on his wife.  I felt this really showed his love for his wife even after what she had done to him.

 Georgie seems to have some mental issues in the way that he is not all there, but proves wrong when helping others.  I found it very interesting that even though he seems less capable of these hard jobs, he is able to come through and treat others. I found it very interesting when Georgie came out of the operating room with the hunting knife in his hand that had been in the mans eye.  Everyone in the hospital seems to be very shocked at this new discovery, "The talk just dropped off a cliff"(page 278).  This shows that everyone was shocked at what Georgie had done because no one thought he was capable of such a hard task.

When Georgie went on the trip through the country I had a hard time connecting everything from the hospital to this trip.  I found the use of drugs awkward.  Georgie should not be using drugs if he is working in a hospital and especially if he pulled a knife out of a mans eye.  I did however find some connection between the two, "That sudden crispness, and the tang of evergreen stabbing us!"(page 280).  This made me have a flashback to the hospital with the eye incident.  The use of the word stabbing references the man who was stabbed in the eye.  All together I found the story to be interesting but a little hard to follow what was real and what was not.

The next story I read was "Home" by Jayne Anne Phillips.  I found this story to be much easier to understand.  Instead of dealing with Georgie and deciding if parts of the story were actually real or not, this story focused on the past and hurt relationships.  The story begins with a woman who has recently moved back home with her mother.  Once she is home the daughter comes across old photos of her mother.  She discovers that her mother is a totally different person.  Instead of being the girl that used to go out and have fun she had turned into someone who just wants to watch tv.  She says, "painted her lashes too lushly, too long; but her deep red mouth is correct."(page 411).  I found this interesting because it shows that the mother has changed but that some parts of her will always remain the same.

The daughter then goes on to talk about her father and their relationship.  I like when she says, "She married him in two weeks.  It took twenty years to divorce him"(page 412).  I felt the mother did not have time to realize who the person was she was marrying, but once they were married she did not want to leave him.  She also might have been scared to divorce him earlier on.  When the daughter talks of her dream I became disturbed.  From the information in the dream we can tell that she possibly was abused as a child.  She says, "He presses himself against my thigh,"(page 414), which shows her fathers disturbing act on his own child.  When I read this part I thought back to "Lolita" and the situation of the older man taking advantage of the younger girl.  

I feel the girl not only has trouble dealing with the issues of her father but of past relationships she was in.  She talks of Jason who came across as her high school sweetheart and first love.  The speaker then goes on to talk about Daniel.  Daniel seems very interesting but already has his own lover, however the speaker talks him into coming to visit her.  I found the part where she tells him of her father very interesting.  Since she has the bad dreams that seem to result from past situations, I felt this would be a hard subject to talk about with someone else.  The speaker then has sex with Daniel in the house.  The mother soon comes back from church and says she heard them in the bedroom.  This is hard for the mother because she does not want to see her child grow up.  The daughter is also having to deal with her mother always being around since she no longer does anything.  I felt the story really let us understand the struggle in everyday relationships and should how hard life and love can be.