Originally Posted by
Cioran
Let's now speak of all the things that are good about Nicholas's story, rather than succumb to the usual destructive negativity of Hillwalker and his obsequious little chatterbox tag-along Cafolini.
Hillwalker got it exactly wrong when he derided the story as "One day I killed a kid, amen." His analysis lays bare the poverty of his reckonings, even though sometimes he makes good points. But even when he does, they are so destructively stated that they are worthless.
This story is not at all about "one day I killed a kid, amen." That's why it's a good story.
The key line -- a fulcrum line -- is:
To me, this story is about an ordinary kid about whom we learn quite a bit, in a minimalist, Carver-like way. He has a Mom who cares for him: he texts her, she leaves the door open for him at night. He has his "nonna" who cares for him and feeds him. They kiss, talk, care for each other. She congratulates him for his "acceptance letter," though the reader is never told what he was accepted to. Possibly college, but who knows? It's a nice touch, keeping this acceptance a mystery. The acceptance letter, and his obviously close family ties, establish him as someone with firm social bonds and a sense of morality and conscience.
But he has a second life. He sells pot on the other side of town -- where he has no friends or enemies. Here, the norms of civilization, of kin and conscience, are cast aside. Here, the narrator can be feral. And he is. He kills a kid, a competitor. Here, in the alleys on the old side of town, it's dog eat dog.
But that's OK, because he quickly comes back to his ordinary life. He compartmentalizes. It's a little slice of life, but don't we all do the same thing? It's a Carver-like slice that portends something bigger. We go about our daily lives, while the government in our name, with our tax dollars, slaughters innocent people in Afghanistan and Pakistan with drone attacks. Why then shouldn't a good kid from a nice family with firm social ties kill a competitor, especially when he is in the bad part of town, a kind of metropolitan Afghanistan or Pakistan, where he has neither friends nor enemies, no ties at all, but just dog-eat-dog competition?
The whole point of this story, what makes it work, is NOT that he kills a kid -- that's incidental. It's all the rest of it. His relation with "nonna," the fine and nostalgic paragraph about his affinity for the night, his mysterious acceptance letter. And the ending in which he looks back on the past and laughs at the talking peanut butter jar. Ten years on, he has abstracted the kid he killed; he has dismissed it like a dream that did not sit too well, and got on with his life. And we can infer, perhaps, that he has had a blameless life since then. Which itself is disturbing. I find this a deeply unsettling story, which makes it a good story.
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