The bright sun was just a shining into the window of my father cottage when I was called by the voice of a female to come and take the last look of my dying father. I was then at the age of six.
The opening line of the book gives immediate insight into the writing style. It is a lush and poetic, but also marked by grammatical lapses. Deeper in will reveal some archaic spellings and further still will unveil a remarkable facility for figurative language. Truly, the writer of this text is artist with the metaphor, wielding them in broad, striking strokes that might be the way Van Gogh would have composed if he’d been writing his memoirs.
Reader, I have now unfolded to you the mysteries and miseries of the New York House of Refuge.
This direct address to the reader becomes a recurring motif. Whenever the author aims to make a certain point of things—to draw special attention to something that clearly is of great meaning or significance to himself—he makes the address. The effect at first is to snap the reader out of the moment and be reminded one is reading a narrative. At times it has the likely unintended effect of reducing credibility and making the story seem like a fiction, but over time that diminishes as one begins to sense that when a sentence begins with “Reader” it is time to pay special attention.
Leaving Avon Springs, I returned Home and committed a crime which brought me back to a gloomy prison.
When composing from the heart and the words are an exclamation of his soul painted in that metaphorical language he weaves, the sentences grow complex and the paragraphs grow long. At odds with these dense passages are the occasional understated fact usually taking up no more space than a single sentence set off from the paragraphs preceding and succeeding. The effect is striking precisely because it seems out of sync and at times almost as if an editorial decision has been made by someone other than the writer. The simple statement of fact about committing a crime which sends him back to prison is more notable for what it lacks: the crime.
Listening to the good advice of this venerable old man, I made up my mind at once that I would go on and try to reform and become a better man — and from that day to this I have had no trouble nor no punishments, for the terror of that day seems to prick me still to the heart.
The venerable old man was not, as might be suspected, a long-time prisoner. The reference is to the “keeper of the kitchen” in the prison and a man who has seen convicts come and go and, in the process, learned which of them can leave forever and which are doomed to return again. He penetrates into the psychological wounds of the author to convince him that complaining of victimization is no path to freedom. He must instead take responsibility for his suffering rather than shift the blame to others. This advice ultimately leads to a measure of redemption, though the book concludes with anger and the dream of vengeful justice in the afterlife still playing about his mind.
