Sunday, October 4, 2009
"time and again" by breece D'J Pancake
“Time and again” by Breece D’J Pancake might have been a short read but it was somewhat tricky. Reading through it the first time I took the reading as a lonely man whose family had left him. He only had the pigs that he took care of and he hoped that one day they would come back. After reading the story for the first time I felt that it didn’t really fit the gothic way of writing so I reread it. During the second time through I looked for more clues that would show a gothic way of writing. The second read through was completely different than the first. The hogs played a huge part in the book, at first I thought that they were only there because the man was lonely but after reading the story closely I realized that the hogs were actually a way for the man to get rid of the bodies. The man was actually a serial killer that would kill hitchhikers along the road, feed the bodies to his hogs and then throw the bones over the cliff. The wife and son were also another huge part of the story. I understood that the wife had died but I didn’t realize in the first read that the man was the one who killed her. The son ran away because he figured out that his father had murdered his mother and actually fed her to the pigs. The man tried to tell the son that the hogs were squealing because they were happy but in reality they were eating his mother. It’s easy to see that something isn’t right with the man especially when he is talking to the hitchhiker while plowing the snow covered roads. He begins to talk about the number of people who were killed in Gauley, the man just agrees and begins to tell stories of being in the paratroops and how it felt to snap the German army’s’ necks. The only thing that saved the hitchhikers life was the fact that the man was just too tired to put the effort into killing him. It’s easy to see this when the man says “he bends forward, grabbing under the seat and his head turned from me. But I am way too tired now and I don’t want to clean the seat.”(Pancake 459) The setting of this story is a very cold and strange setting mostly because of the darkness that takes place. The dark road that only the car lights light up and the man’s house which only has one light on in the kitchen. The coldness of the winter also plays into the gothic writing of the story.
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I do agree with most of this except for when you state that he didn't kill the hitchhiker because "he was just too tired to put the effort into it". Indeed he says he was too tired to clean the seat, but I think that the fact that the hitchhiker reminded him of his own son stands as more motivation to let him go. Despite the notion that he may have killed his wife, he does seem to value family, constantly bringing it up, be it about Mr. Weeks or asking the hitchhiker if he had family in Charleston.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I took the end of the story where, "I pull up beside my house... and I know the house is empty. My hogs stare at me, snort beside their trough. They are waiting for me to feed them, and I walk to their pen," not only as evidence of him feeding bodies to them, but that he is actually going to feed himself to them on this last night. Without this dark suicide, there would be no point to the story, as he would just continue picking up and killing hitchhikers. Tonight, he let one go, and is finally finishing his deed.
I am not native speaker. I read the story and did not understand it untill I read your comments. Thanks.
ReplyDeletehe killed himself it's a weird way to do it but yeah seems like a painful way to go to it's whatever he was crazy anyways
ReplyDeleteOne thing I like about the story is that he planned to kill the hitchhiker. We don't know this when he picks him up (he tells us the "boy" is clean and looks cold) but later he tells the boy to "get down" when Mr Weeks passes. He tells the boy that this is because he'd get in trouble picking people up, but I thought it was so that Mr Weeks didn't see that he had someone in the truck -- someone who would later turn up dead.
ReplyDeleteI think there are two claims the first two writers made that are open to debate: One is that he killed his wife and fed her to the hogs. We know his boy saw SOMEONE being eaten. It could well have been his wife but it's not provable. We also don't know for sure he killed his wife: She may have just died and he fed her to his hogs. The suicide by hog theory is also ambiguous. I think Pancake may have been playing with us a little.
ReplyDelete