Time and Direction
The thing about drunks is that everything eventually always comes back around to alcohol. Where the ellipse is found in the following metaphorical passage there is, you guessed it, a reference to experiencing life while drunk. Sometimes you have to remind alcoholics that not everything in life revolves around liquor. This is especially true when they start to get philosophically metaphorical:
“The moments in your life you regard as the divisions on a compass rather than on a clock face: there are no dates and numbers, but directions, possibilities…Time is the sense of longing you feel to be elsewhere.”
The Joy of Drinking
The thing about stories told from the perspective of an alcoholic is that they have to try walk that thin line between making drinking something worth reading about and, well, the actual physical fact of being an alcoholic. As previously mentioned, everything eventually winds up being related to the inescapable reality that imbibing is really the only thing of interest going on here. The problem, of course, is that even with the use of metaphor, it is hard to make being a drunk seem enjoyable:
“When Mary got into bed you felt the room slip momentarily from your grasp. You let it go. It returned. Lopsidedly. Then, like a television picture with the horizontal hold gone, it began to flip over and over and over . . .”
About That “You”
It is important to keep in mind this novel is narrated in the second-person. So, in the example above, “You let it go” is the narrator referring to himself letting it. And in the example below, the narrator is describing the metaphorical condition of himself having trouble hearing. Not understanding this aspect of the narrative could pose difficulties when reading excerpts out of context:
“But you were having increasing difficulty in hearing her. It was as if, as soon as you had begun walking, someone had been gradually turning down the sound in the garden.”
No, Seriously: Everything Is About Liquor
You thought hyperbole was at work, right? And that “you” is directed toward you: the reader of this. The assertion that in novels about drunks, everything becomes about alcohol, is not overstatement. What is true in life becomes true in the fictional portrayal of life. Everything, literally, comes back around to the big wonderful world of getting liquored up:
“Thirty-four years ago you were born in a small ocean and came into the world on its fullest tide, washed ashore after many months drifting hopelessly at sea. These days, however, you live from moment to moment like a drowning man. When you drink you cease struggling and slip gradually below the surface, easing yourself down fathom by fathom.”
The Darkness
Darkness. The defining metaphor of the modern world. It had to be here in this dark portrait of the underbelly—well, the entire belly—of being an alcoholic. The weird thing is—maybe no so weird, really—that darkness is one of the few metaphors that pops up regularly that is not specifically linked to the act of drinking. The consequences of drinking, sure, but not the liquor itself:
“‘What could you possibly know about love?’ your father once demanded. Afterwards you longed to pull all the world’s darkness into yourself to hide the unbearable shame he had thrust there. That was many years ago – yet now, as you stand alone at the window, you sense that same darkness, like mud, spreading everywhere around and inside you. Soon it will overwhelm you.”
