Killing Penguins

            There is a way to make even death sound amusing. It may sound absurd to even think of such a thing, but everything is a matter of situation and how it is expressed. Death is tragic. Death when caused by some bizarre force or in unexpected circumstances can be seen as much more. If someone where to tell me of a certain person got killed by a penguin, I would laugh. It’s so weird and unlikely that the disbelief factor adds to the effect. A penguin, with their flappy limbs and waddling like pregnant women, killed someone. It’s funny.

            So we see that there can be a fine line between tragedy and humour. If you tread it correctly, you might even make something so painful into something hilarious. In that same way, you can take something that is very painful and drenched with tragedy, and pass it off as something insignificant, amusing, or annoying. It is all in the way you word things, in the language you use to describe said matter. It is all diction.

            Dave Eggers masters this concept perfectly. While dealing with his mother’s cancer and having her upcoming death clear in his conscience, he manages to describe it with such dryness, irony and humour that while the story itself is tragic, the writing is not. Of course, he often does manage to trigger the reader’s emotions and pity, but instead of drowning them in bathos, his use of irony and dry humour in describing his mother’s death makes the feeling of tragedy greater.

            He also creates a certain relationship with the mom that adds to the clichéd outlook of the poor, frail woman about to loose life. An example of this is when he’s trying to stop the bleeding in her nose and asks her if it hurts. To this, she replies, “No, it feels good, stupid.” Maybe it’s just the fact that no typical mother would talk like that to her son, in such a sarcastic teenager conversation manner. Just with his dialogue he’s managing to tell us a lot about the mother as a person and their relationship. It wraps her in this aura of concrete, and while she is lying on a sofa spitting out bile into a plastic container, her words manage to help her keep her dignity.

            His mother is dying and yet his prose is dry and matter-of-fact. He already accepted the fact that she is going to die. And even though his tone is so lacking in dramatics, it is what helps him use pathos and elicit the reader to feel. It works.