Turning to the camera

One of the elements that sets Sag Harbor apart from the other books we've read for this class is the place of Ben-the-narrator. He's more visibly "past" the events in his story than anyone we've seen, making it very clear that he's talking about who he used to be, not who he is now. There's even some confusion in how he talks about his past self, like in when he describes melting Martine's ice cream and says "I can't explain what happened. I can only tell you, the best that I am able, about how I used to live." It's a jarring moment, one of a few scattered throughout the story in which the narrator stops describing the summer of 1985, and turns to the audience to explain his own feelings on his role as the story teller.

These moments, in which the voice of the novel is brought briefly into the present day, come most frequently towards the ends of chapters, especially as the closing lines. They also seem to pick up in density as the book comes to a close. In fact, the very last line of the novel is one such turn: "Isn't it funny? The way the mind works?" It's not surprising that the most jarring lines come at the most significant times, but it does at least go some way to showing why Whitehead chooses to use this tense shift: he wants to put us next to him, as the storyteller, to converse with Benji-as-novelist. 

Why is Ben writing about his youth in Sag Harbor? It's fun for him to reminisce, but he also wants us to know about it -- to understand where he comes from, what he carries with him of his past. (This is especially interesting given that Sag Harbor was Colson Whitehead's fourth and supposedly most conventional novel, so it comes in conversation with this strange, preexisting career as an author.) He wants us to know where he is as an adult, and these asides are his attempt to either remind us that this "other kid" is him, or to get us to get the feeling of his memories, the images which briefly take over his present, like when he asks us if we can feel the music about to start. 

The authors we've read so far have been divided on the issue of adolescenct experience following you into adulthood. Stephen and Ruth, with their respective ideas of epiphanic development and transience seem not to see too much of themselves in the characters they write about -- they're interesting people who are known and important to the narrators, but they are also firmly past. By contrast, Esther and Jason both interact with their younger selves, both personally and as narrators. Esther inserts herself into the subtext of The Bell Jar when she mentions her baby, and when she later describes her illness threatening to "drop" again, while Jason both utilizes Whitehead-esque tense shifts in moments of strong feeling and reveals that many of his chapters are adapted from poems -- meaning that he has presumably gone back to his past writings and adapted them at some older age.

These two characters, along with Ben, represent a philosophy of aging that stands for permanence, the unchanging essence of a person. All three clearly develop, in ways both good and perplexing, but they see their past selves as more than just prior states -- there's a degree of memory there, an ongoing-ness of experience, that makes the person in their memories feel like them, just smaller. Compared to the disconnect of a Ruth or Stephen, this seems like both a scarier and slightly friendlier way to live -- maybe the best word is vulnerable. You're responsible for the things you used to do.