This prompt is for Group 1 (Avery-Leblanc)
Due Monday Feb 7th by 10pm (200-400 words)
In addition to dark humor, satire (largely Menippean, but I’ve mentioned Horatian and Juvenalian), and 18th century wit (specifically Voltaire’s), we’ve briefly discussed postmodernism—specifically postmodern metafiction (as seen in Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain”).
In the Wolff story, we had a man unable to distinguish between the written word and real life human interactive dialogue. In Ames’ “Bored to Death,” we see a similar metafictional move (though not identical). In the story, we have a man who’s both deathly bored with his life and immensely interested in the detective fiction (Noir) books he’s reading. Answer one of the following prompts:
1) What role does metafiction play in the story? Further, this story is Noir-ish, but would certainly not fit in the genre itself. What is Ames doing with the genre?
2) Just as with the Wolff and Woody Allen stories we’ve read, boredom plays a large role in “Bored to Death.” We’ve not discussed the boredom as plot device/motivating force thus far… but with this story, it’s unavoidable. In an 1843 essay (“Crop Rotation”), philosopher Soren Kierkegaard writes, “Strange that boredom, so still and static, should have such power to set things in motion” (227). Analyze the role of boredom in these three stories, and life in the postmodern era in general.
Something you might be interested in:
ReplyDeleteIn Tobias Wolff's short story "Two Boys and a Girl," his protagonist opines, "Everyone's always talking about the banality of evil--what about the evil of banality?" (118).
Here, Wolff is inverting the concept of "the banality of evil," first introduced by Hannah Arendt, to comment that boredom, in and of itself, is an evil. Food for thought.
These three stories paint a good picture of postmodern life in the real world. Granted they paint a very radical picture of life in this era, but the message is clear: boredom kills. People in this era seem to want to live glamorous lives because they are bored with their own. The model people follow for this type of lifestyle comes in many forms: movies, athletics, and (in the case of these short stories) books. These models influence many people in our society in many different ways. In the case of “Bullet in the Brain”, the influence of these models comes in the form of “clichés” that the main character has come to despise. Life for him has become boring because of the cliché of life itself, no one has any essence to their person they just regurgitate phrases that they have had regurgitated to them. In the world of Anders it’s like an endless cycle of regurgitation. Boredom breeds life’s clichés which in turn breeds boredom. In this story, this cycle eventually ended in death, which is a radical image of what life is in the real world. However, one can interpret this “death” symbolically instead of physically. In other words, people in this time period become very bored which essentially “kills” a person.
ReplyDeleteWe can see this form of “death” in the story “Bored to Death”. The main character lives a very boring lifestyle when the reader is introduced to him. This boredom eventually leads the character to make a brash decision to help a girl out which ultimately lands the man in a world of trouble. The reason why he does this is because: 1) he was bored of life, and 2) he wanted to model his life after that of the detectives in the stories he reads. These two factors cause him to mobilize into actions that definitely weren’t rational. Each decision, dialogue, and action this man made was not decided upon by his own knowledge, but each were based in one way or another on what he read in his detective stories. I believe these short stories are portraying the postmodern world as one that is bored with itself. This leads the world to imitation of what it feels is “exciting” and “glamorous”. However, many people get caught up in this imitation and the whole act of imitation leads to the “death” of the essence that made up our society.
Emily Avery
ReplyDelete#2. Boredom is a key component in the eventual demise of Anders in "Bullet in the Brain" as his boredom with life got the better of him. As a literary critic, Anders reads and reviews many peoples' work and eventually gets tired and bored of reading so many. He even "grew angry at writers for writing them." Getting tired of reading what he might consider less than acceptable literature, Anders begins to employ his critic-like opinion in outside matters of the world, like with the bank teller closing her position. He even feels the need to comment on the bank robber and his clichés to the point where it gets him killed.
In "Bored to Death" there is a different kind of boredom present as the main character, Jonathan Ames, is not bored of his profession, but simply because he has nothing to do. It is a result of this boredom that he makes the decision to go on an adventure. That is strengthened by the books he reads in which he is trying to find a similar adventure as the characters he reads about. He bases many of his actions on what he thinks these characters in his book would do. This has everything to do with his being bored with his own life and wanting to be more like characters in books, which go off having adventures and live exciting lives.
Similarly, Kugelmass in "Kugelmass Episode" is bored with his life and wants an adventure, specifically an affair. He doesn’t want to divorce his wife because she has money and he doesn’t want the expenses of getting divorced a second time. Looking for romance, he tries to find an outlet that will relieve him of the boredom he considers his life to be. He tries his luck with a magician, who is briefly able to provide him with some excitement, but ultimately Kugelmass's affair becomes a burden and he is not very happy because of it. The psychiatrist tells him that he is not a magician when Kugelmass is telling him about his problems and similarly, the magician tells Kugelmass that he is no psychiatrist. This shows that Kugelmass really doesn't know what he wants and that this false illusion of happiness is not a way to escape his boredom. However, he doesn't seem to learn his lesson as he returns to the magician, but this time it ends sort of ironically as he winds up trapped in a Spanish textbook, doomed to be bored forever.
In a postmodern context, it can be said that the common theme of boredom was what motivated each of the main characters to make the decisions that caused them trouble. It demonstrates that way of thinking, that we need to search for something more exciting and adventurous than what we already have.
CJ, you've piqued my interest with boredom as a cycle in "Bullet in the brain." I wonder if you could elaborate on that concept and turn it into a fully fleshed out paper. Do you see a similar infinite loop of sorts in "Kugelmass"? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...
ReplyDeleteMaggie LeBlanc
ReplyDeleteIn Ames’ “Bored to Death” is indeed a metafictional story. In metafictional stories, the author or narrator is writing about another fictional story or book or something. I think it is interesting how Ames takes this story about a normal average Joe and turns it into something worth reading. In the beginning when the narrator takes tells of how boring his life is, you almost want to give up right then and say this is nonsense, but then Ames takes it in a different direction. Suddenly, you think you’re reading this murder mystery story rather than the story of a man who was so unhappy with his life that he decided to become a character in one of the books he was reading. He confused reality and his novels and intermingled them into a story he would never forget. Without the metafiction aspect, he would have simply read the books and used their stories to escape his boring life. The story wouldn’t have even unfolded.
Though this isn’t technically a noir story, it still has the essence of it, which is what I think Ames was trying to do. I think he probably didn’t want to write a clichéd detective story, but by using that as his guidelines he wrote an interesting story. Metafiction is definitely Ames’ friend in this one, and he just wanted to expand the genre a little more and maybe dance along the fine-line that is noir and not noir.
Ames’ Bored to Death concerns the connection between fiction and Ames, the narrator. Here, we see a story about a person reading fictional novels and living his life through these novels all while keeping the reader interested and engaged, or at least I was. I would guess it was primarily all Ames’ purpose when using this metafictive device to ensure he does not let the readers forget or become bored to death with what they are reading. In the short story, Ames is the main character who uses characters, names, and fictional occurrences as either products of his imagination or is used fictitiously from other characters in the stories he reads. In this fictional piece, we see a struggling writer, Ames, telling the unfolding story of an advertisement as an unlicensed private detective because he’s had a fascination, or perhaps through odd fancifulness and boredom, of authors he’s read. Exemplifying very similar characteristics and personalities of these characters, Ames tells this story as an excitable and deeply attentive protagonist on a mission.
ReplyDeleteFurther, the author is deciphering the Noir-ish genre of crime fiction from the stories he’s read that features “the danger, the violence, the despair” and using it to his advantage in his the main character’s life, which happens to be a jaded male protagonist and detective (generally what we see in noir novels), to cure his boredom predicament and ultimately keep an intrigued audience.
Sarah Brumfield
ReplyDelete#1 Metafiction plays a massive part in this story. Ames uses the influence of another set of books to structure his own story. Had the main character in the story, who happens to be the author, been reading the dreaded Twilight series would he have ran around town with glitter all over his body biting people? He uses the detective books as an influence of course, but takes it to a whole new level. He seems to go exactly with the grain- get in for the fun, accidentally gets in too deep, huge climax of bad things, the good guy comes out on top. Even after Ames closes his book to actually begin his adventure he keeps it with him, in his pocket, and even reads it as he waits for the next clue to where the Weiss girl or her boy may be. He even refers back to the character in the story,” I couldn’t recall Marlowe or Hammet’s detective, the Continental Op, having to give up a stakeout position because of the toilet.” And at the end of the story, when he has killed the two men that were bringing him out near the river to kill him, he goes to finish the job, not to the police. A regular person, or anyone with the an average amount of brain cells, would have gone straight to the police, not back into the line of fire. He did not have anyone particularly special in town to stay for so why not just leave if he was not going to go to the police? He was not acting as a normal human but as a fictional character in his detective books, goes back to finish the job. Leave the outcome to the reader’s imagination with the hero still with all of his limbs intact. Yes, it is Noir-ish because it is bleak, violent, and menacing with danger at every corner. Though, it is not Noir because the detective (Ames) is not really a detective and does not really know what he is doing. It is all for the story…. I think that is something we can all say we have done from time to time, lived our life just to tell the story the next day.
James Bowie
ReplyDeleteBoredom and metafiction
Group 1 Prompt 1
In the Story bored to death the main character places and ad up has a private detective out of boredom and a longing for adventure. In return he bites of much more than he can chew and gets himself in a pretty bad situation. I should have realized this just from reading the title “Bored to death.” His boredom led him to place the Private investigator add which lead him to discovering dead bodies and killing two people. His boredom led him literally to death he was on the verge of being killed by Mr. G. Through out the story the private investigator seems to be very confident in his ability to find the missing sister. He talks about how he is a good liar and can coax certain information out of people. Almost with a cocky attitude he goes along conducting his investigation. To the private investigator it was almost a game he nonchalantly goes around looking for Lisa. He seems to enjoy this game until he winds of with a gun in his mouth and some broken teeth being interrogated by some very upset gangsters. Its not looking good for the private investigator until he hits Mr. G’s goon with a tire iron and kills Mr. G. In originally placing his ad on Craig’s list he just wanted to play the game of private investigator consequently he ran into a situation that was no game. To me the moral of the story is if you want to play games stick to on backgammon.
Jordan Bloodsworth
ReplyDeleteIn the stories we read, boredom was one of the main factors that bring the story along. Just as Kierkegaard says in his quote, boredom is one of the things that get us started. Looking at each of these stories, boredom put the main characters into action. Outside of these stories, it is boredom that often gets us moving in our everyday lives. The Postmodernism era included this same idea in its writings by creating characters and fueling them with boredom to carry out the story.
Anders from “Bullet in the Brain” is kind of a boring person. Because of his belittling personality in terms of everything and everyone he comes in contact with his life has become boring. The cliché that he hates is exactly what life has turned into for him. As a result, he can not contain his personality in the most serious of situations and it costs him his life.
In “Bored to Death”, the main character decides that because he is bored, he will partake on an adventure like a character in a book. Like the boredom we often face, this sprung him into action. From here, he embarks on a similar journey where he thinks and acts like a fictional character to bring some excitement to his life.
Kugelmass in “Kugelmass Episode” is also leading a boring life and decides he wants to spice it up a little bit. Sadly, he thinks as many people do in our current society and decides he wants an affair so he can get what he wants, but still have his wife’s money. After several trips to a magician and a psychiatrist, who give him contradicting information, he realizes that starting these affairs was no the best cure for his boredom. When it’s all said and done, he gets trapped in a book and will always be bored.
In all, we can relate part of our own lives to these characters. Everyone has started a “project” or taken a “journey” because they were bored. Often, these projects can have life changing results. Sometimes it is for the good, but not everyone can be so lucky.
Emily Hudson.
ReplyDeleteIn the story, “Bored to Death,” the main character, Jonathon is pretty much living his life through the stories that he reads. He even admits that while reading intense Noir novels he starts to believe that he is actually a character in the story and acts like so. After the days trudge on with no exciting events occurring, he decides to actually act like a character from a fiction novel, perhaps one he was reading, to liven up his life. He acts like he is a private detective and tries to help a young girl find her sister. Although Jonathon eventually is successful in finding the girl and solving the case, in reality he’s simply a 40-year-old alcoholic homebody living out a fictional reality for the moment. This is a perfect example of metafictional writing, a story that imitates a story instead of real life. Noir’s novels are also fiction novels, but they represent lives of people in a way that is real. The characters portrayed are not living through an alternate life they made up after they saw it on TV or read about it, it is their actual lives and professions that are being written about. Ames, however, wrote this story in a manner that the main character was not living a “real” life. He was simply entertaining himself with a game and acting like an imaginary character out of a storybook.
Nicholas Filardo
ReplyDelete#1. The story of “Bored to Death” has most of the elements of the Noir genre but it doesn’t truly fit there. It’s just a story about one man trying to alleviate the boredom of life. Sure, he acts as if he was a private investigator but it’s in the interest of adding something new to his routine. He actually gets thrown into the same role that his favorite detectives were in all the novels he’s read. It’s not as easy to act as calm as they do. Ames seems to be redefining the hero role as open to anyone, and not just the elite detectives that always do everything to perfection. They never fail to miss a move in the mind games they play with their targets. I think Ames may have been reliving his experiences with his writing career through his character in “Bored to Death”. He also gives him his own name and refers to the middle name as strange given his heritage. Ames is known for his metafiction in this short story and other works. He makes himself comfortable with telling the story from what appears to be his point of view. He inserts his ideas into his characters and then lives through them a dream he cannot achieve in the real world.
Victoria Doskey
ReplyDeleteIn the Kugelmass Episode, Woody Allen leaves his character trapped in a Spanish textbook stuck in a race with a Spanish verb, he ends this with giving us boredom at the utmost, a foreign language book mixed with movement. Throughout his story we see boredom but in a completely fantastic way to the reader. Kugelmass is leading a boring life and seeks an affair with Madame Bovary, he is brought there in a magical way and once there actually enjoys peaceful walks with his lady in the garden and just being by her side whispering to her. Boredom we may think of as a stagnant, but is really illustrated by Allen as the search for excitement; it is within nothing that we may find pleasure in anything.
Similarly we have the story Dying of Boredom where our author explains that through leaving an turbulent lifestyle involving alcohol he finds himself through a journey which begins with reading. From there he begins to feel the urge to dive into the lives that he reads about. He places an ad on Craigslist as a P.I. and is almost immediately thrust into a dangerous turbulent lifestyle all over again. It is through slow lead ups and through cultivating small pieces to a puzzle, which almost anyone can find puzzles eventually quite boring, that he brings us to the climax of our story. Our author, to entering doors where no one answers, eventually comes across a dead body, which had just been on a ride of it own using drugs. He then is brought to a girl with her mouth covered and her legs tied, through no movement we see an illustration of a very sporadic scary moment.
Both authors allow us to take almost a roller coaster ride of up and down the troughs being the almost still moments and the crests being the points of pinnacle moments. Much like a roller coaster we have a slow chugging up a hill, a build-up of boredom and then BAM! Action!
Leah Bourgeois
ReplyDeleteBoredom plays a big role in the stories “Bullet in the Brain”, “Menagerie”, and “Bored to Death” for the simple fact that it is the common denominator to fuel the characters madness. For example, in Bullet in the Brain boredom is apparent in Andres personality. He is clearly unhappy and he shows it through his constant criticism of almost every book he reviews and how he acts towards the woman at the bank. I also see how he is bored because he has no regard for his life, just like Jonathon Spencer said in the story Bored to Death, “he was bored with being alive”.
It was clear to me that Andres was bored with being alive because he was the only one who continued to speak when the robbers told everyone not to. He was the only one speaking for absolutely no reason, just because he wanted to, and to me I believe he did it on purpose for two reasons. One, to see how serious the robbers were and two, if the robbers were serious about the death threats, he would be okay to die because he had nothing worth living for. The boredom in Menagerie however, played a different role than in Bullet in the Brain , but it was similar in Bored to Death.
The role of boredom played in Menagerie was that almost heroic but in the end was the one thing that brought the watch dog to his death. The German Shepard used his boredom to do his best to keep things in order. He could have ignored the monkey and left everyone in their cages, but I believe it was boredom that made the dog give into the monkey’s suggestions. Also, he kept himself awake and from being bored by protecting the other animals in the pet shop and it worked as best as it could, until he finally fell asleep and that’s when all hell broke loose. In the end, the monkey found a Smith and Wesson pistol and shot the watch dog.
The role of boredom in Bored to Death was similar to that of Menagerie in that Jonathon used his boredom to try and help a college girl find her missing sister (heroic). In the end, yes, the missing sister wound up dying, but his initial effort was for helping someone simply because he had nothing better to do. It was boredom that made him post the ad of craigslist and boredom that kept him from getting out of all that mess in the beginning.
I believe all these stories are similar to the idea of postmodernism. I say this because I believe postmodernism came about simply because people were bored with the old timey way of thinking about things. People got bored in just believing that things are the way they are because God made them that way and for no other reason. The scientific revolution in the 17th-18th centuries could be a great example of postmodernist thinking because Galileo got bored with the old worn out idea that the planets revolved around Earth and so he did some research and decided to change things simply, I believe because he was bored. Boredom can drive people to do many things, suicide, random acts of spontaneity, finding new ways to look at life, etc. but in general boredom can be a dangerous thing if not used correctly. CAUTION: BORED, proceed with caution.
Boredom is the key ingredient in three of these stories. In Ames “Bored to Death” playing Internet backgammon and reading novels is not enough for Jonathan. It seems that because the character is so bored, creating an ad on Craigslist to live a fantasy is the only right thing to do. Being a private detective is new and an ideal job that a child would want to be. As the story progresses, Jonathan’s clues lead him to this Vincent, but Jonathan is not even getting a profit from this make believe job. His boredom leads to an absolute mess, or well chaotic because it revolves around postmodernism.
ReplyDeleteWoody Allen’s story is similar to Ames’ story. Kugelmass has a dream of a basket with a hole in it with the word options. He has no ambitions for anything. At the same time toward the end, his relationship bores him as well. After a long period of time nothing satisfies him. Magic is a theme of postmodernism, and Kugelmass is actually going into these novels. He plays with reality, and with the original text as well. This magic really turns the story bizarre, but it is not dull at all.
“Bullet in the Brain” is closely related to “Bored to Death” in the sense that it involves a lot of irony and playfulness. The main character is a critic and it’s funny that he critiques everything, and is just a very hotheaded person. It’s ironic because everyone in the bank is at gunpoint, and he is making fun of the killers, at every cliché word. It’s at the point when he gets shot, that the story teleports through his life, until the baseball game. All of these stories have a character who make some sort of irrational decision that turns their life chaotic, and at the end of these decisions something bad happens to them, questioning whether they should’ve done these things in the beginning.
Growing up, my grandmother always told me, “And idle mind is the devil’s playground, and idle hands are his tools.” Being a busy kid, I had never given much stock to this adage. However, I feel like Ames’ “Bored to Death” is a perfect example of how being bored can lead to one’s ultimate misfortune. Ames’ character, Jonathan, leads a life that he is dissatisfied with. Nothing gives him pleasure in life except for the novels that he reads. He has become blasé in regards to his everyday activities and views nearly everything as mundane. His ennui is insufferable and therefore leads to his misadventure.
ReplyDeleteIn “The Kugelmass Episode,” the main character is driven by his boredom, not to pain or demise, but simply cast forever into a book that is quite ironically boring. He wanted an affair, something to steam up his life, something that he could use to escape the boredom of his life. Escaping into the romance of literature allowed him a slight respite from his boredom, but eventually it crept back up again.
In Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” his character Anders is not so much bored as he is jaded. He is able to be entertained, but only by the ridiculousness of the world around him. His utter disdain of clichés shows that he is bored with the conventional and the expected.
Like Kierkegaard says in the quote, it is indeed strange that boredom is such a simple feeling, and yet it can be such a powerful motivator. In the two stories we read this week, boredom is what leads the characters to do the things that they did. Personally, I feel that it is a misconception that boredom is derived from a lack of drive. Contrarily, I feel that the will to escape the languor can be something that has “such power to set things in motion.” Granted, often times the activities in which we choose to participate in to relinquish ourselves of this boredom is often borne from a rash urgency and eventually can cause disasters.
Finally, I feel like boredom often connotates a tone of laziness and sluggishness. However, when applied as the motivation of a story, it sets a contrasting tone of hastiness over everything, especially in regards to escaping the boredom.
Courtnay Griffith
ReplyDeleteJonathan Ames' "Bored to Death" is a short story that ties two types of writing together. The first one being metafiction, which gradually flows into noir.
Metafiction is often characterized with the author as a character. The fact that Jonathan Ames is a writer and puts himself into the story it creates a metafictional type of writing. It tends to have a story within a story. The first story in "Bored to Death" is about an alcoholic/junkie writer whose life is reduced to boredom. That story later evolves into an even bigger story in which this bored writer becomes a self proclaimed detective and helps a girl find her younger sister. The story is no longer solely about Jonathan and his boring life but becomes a quest to find a missing girl. Jonathan ties in his life stories, such as his experiences at the Senton Hotel, into the mystery case he has gotten himself in. This makes the story dimensional. I found a quote by John Barth that states metafiction as "a novel that imitates a novel rather than reality" and the line between reality and fiction is blurred. "Bored to Death" is a perfect example of a "novel that imitates a novel rather than reality" because it is written like a classic mystery/detective novel.
The fact that is a short story that resembles a classic mystery ties into how "Bored to Death" has elements of noir as well. "Bored to Death" is a crime fiction which is sterotyped as noir. Jonathan uses numerous mystery novels he has read over the years to recreate that the mystery novel feel. This story story also is set in an urban area which also common characteristic in noir novels and films. Although "Bored to Death" has things in common with typical noir novels and movies, it cannot be classified as one. It isn't in the same time period as most other stories with noir characteristics. It also isn't about a private investigator/detective solving a crime. The story is bored, alcoholic writer that uses detective work to find add something interesting to his life.
Sorry Mr. Banecker, I forgot to do the last part of the prompt.
ReplyDeletePostmodernism is in essence an escape from the views of the modernistic society. Life in a postmodern world is filled with relativity and is less focused on the stark contrasts of what is right and what is wrong.
In Ames' "Bored to Death," he has a peculiar way of making the story into a work of metafiction. In the beginning, he talks about how boring and average his everyday life is and he sounds like a normal "joe"-he plays backgammon all day, has a modest bank account, has addictions, and reads detective novels all day. As the story speeds up and becomes more interesting, he brings in the metafiction by constantly juxtaposing his real life occurrences with fictional novels. He is pointing out things that are happening in real life that are normally reserved for fictional detective stories. He is blatantly pointing out that this is a metafictional story.
ReplyDeleteThis story does have many elements of noir literature. Although Ames is asked for help by Lisa's sister, he still holds true to many of the characteristics of noir literature. He is in no way a professional detective and is tied only to the case by a fascination with detective novels. Also, he has many flaws; he is addicted to alcohol, has a modest bank account, and has no real friends. Also, there is a strong theme of violence in this story. He goes into great detail about how the gun breaks his teeth and the cut he gets on his cheek. He also gives many seedy details about Vincent’s apartment and the Senton Hotel.
Good analysis, Kelli.
ReplyDeleteCourtnay, good idea bringing in Barth's scholarship on the subject. Good research.