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Date Posted: 14:46:05 11/19/08 Wed
Author: SS
Subject: Re: *****************ESSAY2********************
In reply to: SS 's message, "*****************ESSAY2********************" on 22:12:50 11/18/08 Tue

Noah Eaton
English 487
November 16, 2008



Confronting Conjecture: Glass, Mirrors & Truth in Where Will You Go…


Toward the beginning of Gay’s Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?, the subject (but not narrator) Leonard, characterized as “The Jeepster”, becomes immediately depicted as someone who, in the span of forty-eight hours, has “been steady on the move and no place worked for long.” (113). In spite of the intense imagery of him feeling like he was on fire and having the cold wind fan the flames ever further upon him, we are not yet familiar with why it is he can’t keep still, yet are offered oblique imagery of light “falling almost horizontally” and a highway glittering “like some virtual highway in a fairy tale or nightmare.” (113) as he drives westward.
However, after we become familiarized with Leonard’s crystal-meth addiction, and he is seen taking off his Ray-Bans, shaking his head “as if to clear it of whatever visions beset it” (116) and explaining to Emile that he can’t stand in his own skin, the imagery further encapsulates the state of affairs:
Emilie didn’t say anything. He looked away. To the window where the night-mirrored glass turned back their images like sepia desperadoes in some old daguerreotype (117).

At this point we can ascertain that the unique perceptions and images he sees are not merely optical; they’re psychological, and have additional dimension to them in that we are constantly being presented glimpses into his past life and decisions, which Leonard continues to wrestle with no less than his present predicaments. Furthermore, we can
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begin to fathom that Leonard experiences his heartache differently, and where he can’t elicit empathy from even his ex-girlfriend, he resides in his own solitary state, separated from others by the windshield of his SUV, and regularly haunted by the origin of his addiction and the murder of Aimee when confronting the world beyond his windshield through mirrors and glass.
A remarkable contrast follows, with Leonard evidently having forgotten how to eat when starting to take a first nibble at his chicken-fried steak at the General Café. It’s at this awkward moment he wonders if he’s next capable of breathing out instead of breathing in, and are then presented with a maladroit image of him traversing the enormity of the title floor and out into a trembling dusk. By the time he’s back in his SUV, these same enormous, trembling lights return, though fleeting by:
Enormous trees rampant with summer greenery reared out of the night and loomed upon the windshield and slipstreamed away. All day the air had been hot and humid and to the west a storm was forming. Soundless lightning flickered the horizon to a fierce rose, then trembled and vanished (121).

Incidentally, Leonard is consciously aware of his “affinity for the night side of human nature” as he earnestly dubs, and thus also recognizes he must eventually face his present demons directly, rather than defensively posture himself behind thick layers of glass. Otherwise, the intensity of each succeeding seismic flash would grow ever more unbearable to his nerves.
While reminiscing on his near-suicidal experiences and the murder of his loved one, another dimension of mystique is applied to the windshield and SUV windows:
He lay in the back seat of the SUV and tried to sleep. Rain pounded on the Eaton 3
roof, wind-whipped rain rendered the glass opaque and everything beyond these windows a matter of conjecture………Things would not leave him alone, old unheeded voices plagued his ears. Brightly colored images tumbled through his mind. An enormous, stained-glass serpent had shattered inside him and was moving around blindly reassembling himself. (123)

For the first time we deliberate that Leonard isn’t free of his tribulations, even when situated behind layers of glass. If anything, the voices he hears and the sights he endures are more harrowing in his dreams and subconscious state, rather than when consciously engaged with the “conjecture” beyond those windows, as abstruse as it may appear to him in contrast to the more gritty, earthy, brutal visuals of Aimee’s death outside the Quik Mart.
What’s especially fascinating, and all the more sinister here, can be noted in the utter absence of quotation marks in juxtaposing actual dialogue with more figurative conversational undercurrents, to further agonize Leonard’s predicament, regardless of when he’s behind or beyond the glass. In a March 2007 interview with William Gay, the editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, John Kenyon, inquired him on his lack of their usage, to which he responded:
…it seems to me that when you separate dialogue from narrative, enclosing it in quotes, it makes it less a part of the narrative. I like the feel when it’s all of a piece, and the dialogue is no more important than the description or the movement of the characters. When you put quotes around it, it seems to say, this is important, look at this

Thus highlights the gruesome realization that Leonard has made: that no brittle, transparent, twenty-inch wide rectangle of amorphous solid can shelter him from either the “conjecture” or his personal demons. That the enormity of the hurt he bears seemingly
Eaton 4
has a language of its own, speaking with a greater timbre than that of any conversation he’d have with any other person, where even his constant motion is laden with figurative language.
Consequentially, he opens the door of his SUV, marching through the torrential rain toward the springhouse as the vengeful, anonymous narrator observes, steps into the chamber during a closed-casket service and is struck in the face with a stick by the father and, having collapsed to the ground, sees “with unimpeachable clarity that there were other worlds than this one” (126). By the final paragraph, the narrator decides:
I would kill him if he was worth it but he ain’t. A son of a bitch like this just goes through life tearin up stuff, and somebody else has always got to sweep up the glass. He don’t know what it is to hurt, he might as well be blind and deaf. He don’t feel things the way the rest of us does (126)

Either irony throws a curveball here, or the narrator has proven oblivious to how Leonard is no less frightened of the trembling enormity of the night side of human nature than any quiet bystander he passes by in a café or Ackerman’s Field. Most notably, however, the narrator depicts glass in a shattered form, contrary to the actuality that in each instance Leonard and glass are dovetailed, none has been shattered. Which may also suggest that, if the narrator hadn’t been blinded by prejudice and was able to see meth addicts as human, he would have thought Leonard as “worth it”, and thus would have killed him.
Ultimately, we can suggest that glass takes on an additional connotation by the end of the story; reflecting not just a form of shelter, not just a reflection of the sentimental truth that we all bear hurt and feel in different ways, but also a grim reminder of the antipathy some harbor toward others, failing to judge others at face value and
Eaton 5
allowing their own conjecture to cloud their judgment like torrential rain making Leonard’s SUV windows opaque.




















Eaton 6
Works Cited
Gay, William. “Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?.” The Best
American Short Stories 2007. Ed. Stephen King. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007. 113-126.
Kenyon, John. "Monday Interview: William Gay.“ http://www.tirbd.com 26 Mar. 2007.
15 Nov. 2008 .

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