June 1st, 2017 at 05:07am
The opening paragraph's comparison is so striking that it immediately grabs the reader's attention, as well is the fact that it's mentioned, point blank, that it's not beautiful - straight away speaking to the naive and glamourising view that blood in the context it's appearing is never remotely beautiful in real life. The fact that he doesn't seem to quite grasp the situation, believing that it must be a nightmare, is very relatable and genuine. No one wants to believe that something so terrible could happen to them, let alone to someone that they know. It's always the idea that it happens to others but somehow it never happens to them.
The narrator talks about how the guilt is eating him up but you can't really feel it with his actions and thoughts. You can feel his loss, his disbelief that something like this has happened, but you don't really feel his guilt. Simply saying that he feels it doesn't make it true, and I think had you made this a little bit longer you could have conveyed it perfectly, thus allowing this piece to contain the cyclical thought process that is common: the shock, the disbelief, the loss, the guilt.
This piece still has a big impact on the reader as you've written about this topic in such a way that feels real.
This story reminds me of the Kait Rokowski quote, “Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.” Which is a good thing because this is one of my favorite quotes with how true and accurate it is, and in this story, you’re kind of acknowledging that we, as humans, glorify and put a beauty into self-harm and suicide when it’s not poetic or beautiful at all. Your execution of this has a good message.
However, I think you could have written about the emotions in more depth. The narrator talks about a starving guilt eating at them for doing something that pushed Nash to do what he did, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel regret and guilt and sorrow and heartbreak. I don’t even really feel the pain or shock of the entire situation. Like Mr. Darcy said, simply saying that the narrator “did [this]” and “felt [this]” doesn’t make it true. It doesn’t resonate with the reader. When people read literature or poetry, they want to feel something. They want it to rattle something inside of them because this is what art is supposed to do—it’s supposed to move you, turn you upside down, make you laugh or smile or cry or feel like your heart is actually breaking, and this piece has this… almost empty feeling to it. Where I do feel sympathy, I lack empathy again and I feel disconnected from your narrator and the situation. I want to feel immersed, I want to feel everything the narrator is feeling, and I think if you wrote about the spectrum of emotions in more depth, you could convey all of this beautifully. If you fleshed out your narrative and emotions more and paired it with your blunt writing style, I think you could create something remarkable.
As I said though, I do appreciate the way you chose to write about such a taboo subject. Nice job!