“In the Diner”
Book 1, chapter 11; Book 2, chapter 23
Characters
1.11 three hip young men (two unnamed, one “Ray”), a 53-year old waitress (unnamed)
2.23 a man remembering/ imagining (unnamed), an unnamed mother, father and child.
General Subject/ Plot
1.11: three young men treat someone of lower social standing insultingly, after which one of them is suddenly shot.
2.23: A man at a diner doesn’t know whether he’s remembering or imagining this: a child’s desolation at the unraveling of his parent’s marriage (?).
Motifs
1.11 Daily News, Jesus/ Jesus Christ, diner, pink polyester uniform, white shoes, death by shooting.
2.23 Snow, “magical dress”, cheese danish (versus cheese cake of second In Dreams), navy blue overcoat, white scarf with polka dots, grey fedora, Worcestershire sauce, baloney sandwich.
Notes
We’re told, in a previous chapter, that Claire’s brother was shot outside a diner.
In the second “In Dreams”, where a diner is dreamt of, all three of the toughs are shot, not just the one.
In the second “In Dreams” one of the deadbeats displays a ketchup bottle through his pants. There is a ketchup bottle beside the Worcestershire sauce in the second “In the Diner”.
The second “In The Diner” involves questions of identity, as for instance, occurs in the first “Movies” (A person trying to establish something about the past becomes lost in selves, versions of selves.)
The magic dress in the second “In the Diner” brings to mind the one we just read, the first “A Familiar Woman”, a key to what is meant there perhaps.
The question arises, while reading A Strange Commonplace, to what extent is this autobiographical; it will seem that the second “In The Diner” also sort of asks that?
Maybe to be wondered about, how the two “In The Diners” relate to the second “In Dreams”. (For one thing, “In Dreams” seems an extreme version of the first in the diner: instead of a waitress being insulted she is raped and sodomized, and instead of one of those who insulted her getting killed, all three of them are.)
In the last few sentences of the second “In the Diner” the existence of the protagonist seems to toggle between that of a boy in the kitchen and that of a man in the diner –the familiar comforting personal space (boyhood, the mother, the kitchen, the past) with the hard impersonal space of the present, the diner, the father.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 