Happiness and Why I'm Not Where You Are - Noah Blumenthal

First, I just wanted to say that the interview with Tomoyasu made me think of Paul D talking to Sethe about the boys in the barn. The interviewer kept asking about the generic facts of the bombing, like the mushroom cloud and the black rain, but Tomoyasu replied with, "I didn't see the mushroom cloud. I was trying to find Masako." It reminded me of Sethe not caring about anything other than, "They took my milk."

Now then, "Happiness, Happiness" and "Why I'm Not Where You Are, 4/12/78" were suprisingly similar, for all their content seemed to be day and night. First of all, they're both written as a stream of consciousness (more so in WINWYA), which makes everything somewhat befuddled, and can give the impression that the narrator is dreaming (again, more so in WINWYA). In the case of Happiness, I got the befuddled feeling from the random insertions of letters to Oskar (especially since none of them included the letters they were responding to) and from the erratic passage of time (even though it was clear at what time everything was happening, it was suddenly announced that "Monday was boring," for example). It didn't have the same effect as bombs everywhere and suddenly being told to shoot animals that escaped from the zoo and running from cellar to cellar and seeing people in the lake and equating thinking with living, but then the better connection to draw would be between the two Thomas Schells.

Second of all, there were small images that were referenced in both chapters. In "Happiness," Oskar sees a clothesline for the first time and Alice black was covered in charcoal. In "WINWYA," Thomas sees a charcoal-stained shirt hanging from a clothes line, and the "charcoal stained" is circled, so the author wanted people to notice it. There's also a line in "WINWYA" that says, "...sometimes I take [an encyclopedia] down and read about other people's lives, kings, actresses, assasins, judges, anthropologists, tennis champions,..." and so on. Apart from one of the Blacks being someone who had wanted to be an actor, that is very similar to what Oskar is doing, only he's visiting people instead of reading a book.