Darkly Humorous, Self-satirizing, and Hilariously Tragic.

            There is something that stands out when every time a character is mentioned, they’re doing the exact same thing they were doing before. Always. This is the case for Egger’s father:

            “Through the family room window, in the middle of the white silver screen, my father was in his suit, a grey suit, dressed for work…. He did not move. His suit, even with him kneeling, leaning forward, was loose on his shoulders and back. He had lost so much weight. “

            This paragraph is placed in its own private strand of square page. By that I mean to say that there are three wide spaces between the paragraph preceding this one and also the one that follows it. Almost like a sudden thought in your conscience, so abrupt and placed between to abruptly in between because it’s that noteworthy. And it is. Here we have Eggers exposing some random, concise, and yet powerful dialogue between him and his brother Toph and then Bam, this paragraph is alone with too much space for itself. The image is heartbreaking. The suit itself is just a great detail to perfectly capture the idea of a working man, ruffled and tired, getting home only to kneel forward, like people bowing down in exhaustion or in deference, clad in duress. The mere detail of the suit’s looseness on his figure shows his apparent instability, how he isn’t exactly steady. The statement about his having lost so much weight just highlights the suffering of something that manages to even deprive you of you appetite. One paragraph and it is so apparent that his wife’s disease is not only killing her, it’s killing him.

            About ten pages later and the same type of random paragraph appears, isolated, mentioning the father once again:

            “ My father had not moved. He was about ten feet from the street. He was kneeling, but with his hands on the ground, fingers extended down, like roots from a riverbed tree. He was not praying. His head tilted back for a moment as he looked up, not to the sky, but to the trees in the neighbour’s backyard. He was still on his knees.”

            What is interesting about this is the time span between these two paragraphs. Eggers places a lot of material in between the two so when the reader comes by the father, still in the sameness of before, it makes you halt. The fact that so many things have happened and the father is still there emphasises the lack of time, highlighting his actions. If it were not for this repetition of sorts, the reader would, sure, take into account the father and his suit, but eventually forget. This last paragraph brings the reader back to the father, in the dame position, but with his hands on the ground almost as if trying to dig up anything worthwhile, trying to grasp the metaphorical treasure that will bring him happiness. Trying to find anything. It’s depressing. His suffering is obvious and one wonders about how his life will pan out. One might even infer that he will probably fly up to heaven with Egger’s mother as well.

            And he does. Eggers starts out two pages later by saying, “ You should have seen my father’s service.” So, of course, he died. It’s interesting how said fact is unknown until after the paragraph about his father’s funeral. This is a great example of how Dave Eggers manages to visibly show the abruptness of his father’s death via the abruptness of is prose. The news, to say the least, is sudden to the reader in apparently the same way it was to Eggers. Later he proceeds to actually explain and speak of his dad when he was in the road to dying (that sounds odd) and describes how “I did not know that last time I saw my father would be the last time I would see my father.” His father was in intensive care and when Eggers entered his room, he was sprawled on the bed, cigarette in hand, “grinning like he had won the biggest award there ever was.” Am I the only one that finds that disturbing? The guy just been diagnosed with God-knows what and he’s smirking, a mocking smile plastered on his face? I guess after all the suffering in thinking of his wife’s impending death, he just realized dying with her was the perfect solution.

            It’s sad. What’s even sadder is the way Egger writes it. No, his tone is not borderline dramatic and lugubrious stuffed. His tone is actually pretty dry, ironic, humorous. The fact that his tone is anything but sad is a tool he uses to distance himself. It is the means by which he copes and is able to retell what to him must be a really painful experience. But he does it this way because he can, and even then, that he does with that type of diction makes the reader feel even more. The way he is obviously detracting himself from said occurrence makes his story all the more real and all the more touching. He could have decided to display the tragedy of his life by aiming for pity and resorting to deep metaphors of his withered soul and frayed heart. But he didn’t. His diction is what makes A Heartbreaking work of Staggering Genius  the work that it is: Darkly humorous, self-satirizing, and hilariously tragic.