Readings for 02/11/18

I enjoyed reading Denis Johnson’s “Emergency” and “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.”  The two stories were very attention grabbing and not what I expected when I began both stories.  The character of Georgie in “Emergency” is especially uncharacteristic of a protagonist.  He is a klutz and endangerment to patients by not following protocol and procedure with things, as evidence when he pulled the knife out of the one man’s head right before everyone was prepping to do surgery to remove it.  Georgie is oblivious to his potential endangerment too, which makes him even more dangerous in my opinion.  He is a thief, which is shown when he steals the pills for him and the narrator to get high on.  He is an addict, which is also shown when he steals the pills and other things are mentioned in the story.  The way the narrator sums up the story though is very interesting in that he portrays a big difference between Georgie and himself.  He then goes on to start talking about picking up Hardee and taking him to Canada to escape being AWOL, and calling back to the baby rabbits, the last line, which was Georgie saying, “I save lives,” make you reflect back to him also pulling the knife out of the man’s head to thankfully no harm and realize that somehow this screwball really does save lives.  We get another unlikely protagonist in “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” where the narrator is a wondering hitchhiker who gets picked up by a family on a stormy night.  He talks about sensing that something bad was going to happen before it did, and sure enough they all get in a horrible car accident.  The hitchhiker is unharmed, of course, and so is the baby next to him.  The mother is at first painted to have died in the front seat holding the passed out, moaning daughter, and the bloody father is frantically trying to wake them up.  Just when you think the hitchhiker is going to abandon everyone, he takes the baby up to the main road, flags down a semi truck, and calls and waits for help.  Both characters defy the readers expectations on what they are capable of and what a “hero” can look like.  They are classic examples of not judging books by their covers.