For those readers who prefer quick sentences, short paragraphs and an overabundance of description that is somewhat south of the levee, this book is for you. In its original published edition, I am the Messenger runs almost three-hundred-fifty pages. Some joker on the internet put a version together which compacts the one-sentence paragraphs and makes other assorted edits that resulted in a more conventional appearance and the exact same book—every word intact—clocks in at under seventy pages. The point? This is a quicker reader than it looks. That can be vitally important for some readers (especially students) and it is perhaps worth knowing that what looks like a nearly 400-page-slog is really only going to take about as long to read as a zippy 150-page-turner.
It is not just a stylistic choice by the author. The plethora of one-sentence-long paragraphs and the dearth of long chunky blocks of wordy descriptive paragraphs are there to serve a narrative point. This begins to becomes clear fairly early on in the narrative at a singularly important moment when the narrator writes:
“He eventually gets in and tries to start the car countless times, but it never kicks over.
Then.
For some reason I’ll never understand.”
It will not become completely apparent until the very end of the novel, but suffice to say that there is a a method to the madness of the staccato approach of structure in the novel. There are entire pages where half the paragraphs consist of just one sentence. A random stopping point, for instance, features eleven one-sentence paragraphs out of sixteen and of those eleven about half are three words long or less. The result of this minimalist approach is thematic in nature: it takes on the characteristics of a person speaking who is not quite sure of himself and pause to think, consider, reflect or just plain not be entirely sure what is going to come out next.
That, in a nutshell, describes the protagonist, Ed Kennedy. He is a slacker with a dead-end job and no ambition and an avoidance of dreams except for unrequited love who hangs around with friends who are mostly the same. In other words, there is no reason for him to even be writing about his life, and yet here we are. He finally has a story to tell, but the story is one in which events seem to be driving him rather than him driving events. As a result, there is a disconnect which is reflected in the actual writings style. For instance, the opening words of chapter titled “edgar street revisited.”
“It feels like the mornings clap their hands.
To make me wake.”
First of all, there is nothing in Ed’s background to suggest that he is a master of metaphorical language. Secondly, the little stutter there in the indentation of the second line creates the impression of a pause, almost if that first line with the metaphor wasn’t really planned and he needed a second to think it over and make sense of it. This sort of manipulation of time, cognitive abilities and the suggestion of external control over thought processing of the narrator is pervasive and intentional. The purpose behind it will not be fully revealed until the end, but once revealed it all makes sense.
