Prior to this class, I had never read any Murakami before, and I really enjoyed A Wild Sheep Chase. Murakami filters these absurd, sometimes almost supernatural experiences through a detached narrator, and I think this way of framing the narrative makes everything stand out just a bit more. By making Boku’s narration feel emotionally distant, it forces the readers to try and figure out their own feelings on what is occurring, rather than just reading how Boku feels and running with it. Some parts of the book, like when the Sheep Man appears, would have made a different kind of protagonist try to rationalize what was happening, but Boku just went with it, adding to the uncanny feeling of the story.
I was also interested in the idea of intertextuality in both Murakami and Chandler, and how some of the references in the books hinged on other cultural contexts, thus creating a web of prior knowledge needed to truly grasp what was being said. The thing that stood out to me the most, however, is how the characters themselves interacted with these references. On page 356 of The Long Goodbye, Amos mentions the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Marlowe, and the two have a short conversation referencing it before dropping the subject. Personally, I really enjoy this poem, so hearing how they didn’t understand it was sort of funny, especially given how the aimlessness of the actual poem, to me, reflected the general aimlessness of The Long Goodbye itself—I wasn’t a huge fan of the book and found the plot very meandering. A lot happened, but in the end the inciting incident of Lennox’s death turns out to be fake, and it just left me wondering what the point of any of it was. Either way, this scene in The Long Goodbye left me thinking about how the opinions characters within a book can have about another book or piece of media then puts the two works into a comparison of sorts, leading to associations that may not previously have appeared before.
I was also interested in the idea of intertextuality in both Murakami and Chandler, and how some of the references in the books hinged on other cultural contexts, thus creating a web of prior knowledge needed to truly grasp what was being said. The thing that stood out to me the most, however, is how the characters themselves interacted with these references. On page 356 of The Long Goodbye, Amos mentions the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Marlowe, and the two have a short conversation referencing it before dropping the subject. Personally, I really enjoy this poem, so hearing how they didn’t understand it was sort of funny, especially given how the aimlessness of the actual poem, to me, reflected the general aimlessness of The Long Goodbye itself—I wasn’t a huge fan of the book and found the plot very meandering. A lot happened, but in the end the inciting incident of Lennox’s death turns out to be fake, and it just left me wondering what the point of any of it was. Either way, this scene in The Long Goodbye left me thinking about how the opinions characters within a book can have about another book or piece of media then puts the two works into a comparison of sorts, leading to associations that may not previously have appeared before.
- Laura Hurley
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