Superheroes

When I first realized “No Face” was revisiting the character of Ysrael from the first story, I was intrigued, because I remember that opening story being really good, and also terrified, because Ysrael’s life seems horribly depressing and dark and I didn’t want to know what became of him. “No Face” took all my expectations and POW zapped them to pieces. Ysrael’s life in “No Face,” while incredibly bleak and traumatic, is actually portrayed as an adventure, something he can still have fun with. Ysrael spends his time scavenging for coins among unconscious drunks, getting harassed on the street for helping cats, and being attacked by mobs of kids, all because of his legendary deformity. He describes the people in his world, with the exception of Father Lou and his own family, as his enemies. And yet he is smiling under his mask. He is a superhero, and he enjoys the thrill of escape. While he’s certainly not invulnerable, throughout this story he takes an extremely negative situation and sees it as just part of his world, nothing he can’t handle with his supernatural abilities. After being chased off by the cleaning woman he even shows off a little: “he’d grip the bars of the gate and pull them a bit apart, grunting, to show her who she was messing with” (Diaz 155).

It makes perfect sense to me that Ysrael would identify with a superhero, who often start their career with some sort of accident and have powers that could be seen as a kind of defect. They’re tough, and they face a lot of enemies but they always defeat the evil powers around them. “Today he buys Kaliman, who takes no shit and wears a turban. If his face were covered he’d be perfect” (Diaz 155). As for Ysrael’s actual superpowers, I think it’s pretty clear that--while he is incredibly fast and strong--they don’t literally exist. The fact that they’re presented to the reader as fact though, shows us that they are very real in Ysrael’s mind and that he is able to use his imagination to escape his circumstances. I think it’s pretty impressive that this kid who wears a flea-infested mask, who’s accused of eating children and is attacked at random, is still able to feel confident in himself, like he’s on top of the world. At the same time, it’s possible that all of this is completely incorrect. We know it’s not really Ysrael narrating this story, so any resolution we may start to have thinking that Ysrael is really doing fine, is kind of thwarted by the fact that we really don’t know what’s going on in his head. While the narrative voice reminds me of a sports commentator, always with a sense of excitement and suspense, constantly presenting Ysrael as heroic and admirable, it’s still an outside view, not Ysrael’s own voice. (I kept being a little shocked realizing the story is in 3rd person. It feels like it’s Ysrael narrating, but it can’t be).

The idea that Yunior is narrating the story is intriguing and makes a lot of sense to me. Yunior was always more understanding of Ysrael than the other children and less easily motivated towards violence. He still participated in tormenting him in gangs, feeling especially accomplished about hitting Ysrael in the back with a rock. “We laughed and went back to our baseball games and forgot him until he came to town again and then we dropped what we were doing and chased him” (Diaz15). But Yunior’s narration has always shown him to be a gentler character who clashes a little with his society’s definition of masculinity and toughness. He seemed a little out of place even in the gang of kids, and is shocked when his brother knocks Ysrael out from behind to get a glimpse of his face. By narrating “No Face” to us, it’s almost like Yunior is trying to make amends, or to go back and try to comprehend what Ysrael’s life was like and who he really was: just another boy, a potential classmate or even friend. But no! Ysrael was special, powerful in his own way, and someone who Yunior ultimately respected, even admired. We don’t really know if Ysrael actually sees himself as a superhero, but by choosing to narrate “No Face” in such an enthralling style, it’s clear that Yunior did see him that way, as someone out fighting to survive, a legendary figure, and maybe an intimidating one too. If Yunior is narrating, “No Face” really tells us a lot more about Yunior’s character and his ability to empathize than it does about Ysrael himself. This fits since the collection as a whole is kind of about Yunior’s maturation and growing up in a tough world, however I was kind of disappointed to realize that this means “No Face” may not be even close to Ysrael’s reality.

Ysrael’s physical abilities are pretty indisputable from the story “Ysrael,” and if he did go to a comic book store every week, it’s likely that he would still have the same wild imagination and be able to connect to the characters. However, I find it incredibly unlikely that Yunior ever went back and sat down with Ysrael like he did with Nilda, or this story would probably be told in a style more similar to that of “Negocios.” While I could imagine child-Yunior being a bit of a stalker, I don’t think he observed all of the events in this story and I think large portions of “No Face” are fictional. Ysrael continues to be more of a legend and while we can see from this story that Yunior wishes to understand him, in reality I don’t see Ysrael’s outlook as being very promising at all. There’s no way a teenager or adult can go on pretending to be a superhero and not be completely written off (not that Ysrael isn’t already exiled from society). It brings me back to the ending of “Ysrael,” after Rafa and Yunior have seen his face and are riding the bus home:

“Ysrael will be OK, I said.

Don’t bet on it.

They’re going to fix him. …

Yunior, he said tiredly. They aren’t going to do shit to him.

How do you know?

I know, he said” (Diaz 19).

Moore's Endings and How to Get Help

I really enjoyed Self-Help by Lorrie Moore and getting to experience new styles of narration. While some of her 2nd-person narrations did feel a little experimental, I didn’t find that the style distracted from the story at any point. On the whole, narrating in 2nd person made it harder to judge any of the characters even when they were doing morally questionable things (such as cheating on people), because the reader experienced it as “you,” forcing the reader to see themselves as the troubled character. In some of the stories, such as “How,” the plot is presented at first almost like a choose-your-own-adventure story, with options for what occupation you have or what dates you might go on. I found this style could be occasionally annoying, but it was effective in adding a sense of loneliness or detachment, like these details didn't matter. All the weird narrative formats, including "How to Talk to Your Mother," told going backwards in time, made Self-Help a unique and refreshing read and I was generally very impressed by Lorrie Moore's writing.

Self-Help works extraordinarily well as a collection, in my opinion, playing on similar themes throughout the book of insecurity, emotional instability, self-reflection, and feeling trapped. All of Moore’s characters feel in some way stuck in their situation, whether it be in a relationship with a dishonest man, on a deathbed surrounded by people who question her, or in a domestic life and low-status job that has her feeling suffocated and yearning for a more ambitious life. Another common element of Moore’s stories is the humor--a major feature in all of them. While the stories often deal with rather dark subject matter and many of the characters seem to struggle with Depression or deal with other losses in their lives, the sort of morbid humor, puns, and other ridiculous jokes exist in such a presence that the loaded situations the characters are in end up being less emotional than we might expect. A lot of the humor comes from the sort of awkwardness/clumsiness that many of the women in these stories seem to have (one of the best examples perhaps being the line on the bus about book bindings). I like to relate this humor back to the epigraph (“The purpose of this book is to direct attention to the ways in which non-backboned animals reproduce,” etc.) which I think perfectly captures the subtle humor and the serious but strangely laughable tone Moore is going for. Even so, the humor in this book also makes some of the content more depressing to me because the witty, sarcastic humor sometimes feeds into negative thoughts and self-deprecation. It makes some of the characters seem as though they’ve lost some of their capacity to feel or express emotion, or that the only way they can cope with their situation is to try and laugh about it.

The story “To Fill” stood out to me as being pretty different from the others in the collection and I think it is a fitting end. For one thing, though the entire book is about women struggling through hard times and dealing with their own minds and ambitions and needs for love, independence, etc., this is the first time a character actually has a breakdown and seems to really hit rock bottom. She stabs her husband and is taken away from her child and it’s a very bleak outlook for this character. However, because of this breakdown there’s actually more hope in this story that a better future may come for her than in any of the other stories, where the problems are confined to the character’s mind and they are left alone to hope these feelings will slowly dissipate. In “How,” for example, the ending is the woman finally leaving her ill husband and walking off feeling guilty and a little ashamed, even if the choice was right for her. “A week, a month, a year. The sadness will die like an old dog. You will feel nothing but indifference… One of those endings” (Moore 64). In “How to be an Other Woman,” she is left alone, pretending to be okay when her ex-lover calls her on the phone. “Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity,” (Moore 21). Even “How to Become a Writer” ends with the character quitting her job, wondering what her purpose in life is, and describing her love life as an occasional “date with a face blank as a sheet of paper” (Moore 126). The endings aren’t always necessarily tragic, but they all lack a sense of fulfillment and feel more restless, making me a little nervous for the mental/emotional state of the main character. However, in “To Fill” there is actually a somewhat optimistic tone to the ending, with the woman potentially able to get treatment, and at the very least able to see her son again. It’s still not happy, but to me it’s more hopeful that any of the other stories.

I’m not entirely sure what the significance of this story--that hits rock bottom and then reaches a new high--being at the end is, but I think there’s something that could be said about trying to keep emotions to yourself and survive only through “self-help” as opposed to letting others take care of you a bit. The women in these stories have so many thoughts and feelings that they all almost go crazy because it’s too much confusion to sanely handle in one mind, and they need a way to let it out. While clearly stabbing your husband isn’t the accepted way to do that, by writing all these stories on women who are stuck, I think Moore is letting people know that they aren’t alone in having these feelings, and that sometimes you can’t get through everything by yourself. Sometimes you need to stop and get help. Yet many of Moore's women are fiercely independent or needing to get away from people, so I don’t know if that’s really what Moore is going for theme-wise, maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but that’s something I interpreted from her work.