“Yes, yes, I can see him! No, you can’t, he was completely swallowed up by the briars. A pity, but it was too late. No! Hurry! Here I am! It’s not too late!” (24)
My favorite element of Briar Rose thus far has been Coover’s ever-confusing discourse. This passage is just one rapid-fire example of the book’s fascinating contradiction and ambivalence. The omniscient third person narrator switches perspectives quite often, so even though the narrator remains a constant, he offers splitting views of his story-views far removed from each other and so somewhat jarring and disorienting to the reader. The speakers are also at times difficult to differentiate and follow, so much so that the reader could wonder whether the narrator or one of two of the other characters is speaking. This style of confusion emphasizes the uncertainty and ambiguity of the story and seems to challenge the discrepancies between dream and reality, sleep and awake, story and prophecy. He offers no clear guideline for what to take literally, so every word is in question—every sentiment is malleable, every moment a lifetime yet still no time at all, every wakening a dream or a story or a memory. I have a hard time deciding what to make of it all, but I feel it speaks to a look at the ‘what we’re supposed to be.’ The sleeper asks, “Who am I? she demands. What am I?” (17). Her struggle might be with expectations of living up to sexual expectations and motherly expectations, symbolized in the many dead and living children she has while comatose. The adventurer sees her with lust, then in a friendly sense, as he also struggles with how to see his quest and himself as a hero. His struggle may lie in wanting to be “the one” while beginning to see those very efforts to make him just like the failed men whose shells he sees on his path.
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