Work In Progress

Humor and Pathos in Adam Haslett’s “Notes to My Biographer”

In Adam Haslett’s story, Notes to My Biographer, the narrator tells us abouy “two things to get straight from the beginning: [he] hates doctors and [he has] never joined a support group in [his] life” (1). As I read this story, there were two things that became clear: Notes to My Biographer is both funny and endearing. Haslett’s technique of blending humor and pathos produces a beautiful and terrible narrative. Furthermore, the layering of humor and emotion within the story serves to heighten the disjointed perspective of the main character, Frank, as he maneuvers between mental delusion and lucidity.

When the narrator, Frank, describes his son Graham to the reader, he states that Graham “learned from his mother; he [Graham] presses play and the fraction of his ancestry that suffered from conventionalism speaks through his mouth like a ventriloquist: Your-idea-is-fantasy-calm-down-it-will-be-the-ruin-of-you-medication-medication-medication” (9). The reader can assume from this passage that Graham embraces the convention of his mother’s (sane) side of the family and, simultaneously, chastises his father for his “eccentricity.” Frank doesn’t bother to go into details which emphasizes his lack of concern (or perhaps the refusal to validate Graham’s comments). Instead, Frank focuses on his own memories of Graham:

He has a good mind, my son, always has, and somewhere the temerity to use it, to spear mediocrity in the eye, but in a world that encourages nothing of the sort, the curious boy becomes the anxious man. He must suffer his people’s regard for appearances. Sad (9).

This contrast between humor (the string, medication-medication-medication) and the pathos that immediately follows has numerous effects. First, as stated above, it seems to heighten Frank’s fractured narration as he moves from the action of the present into his obsession with an idea for a new bicycle invention. Second, it keeps Frank from propelling too far out of the reader’s “empathy zone.” While Frank is certainly a character that demands a reader’s interest, the fragments of humanity and emotion that we are allowed to experience in Frank’s narration keeps us more that just “interested” in what happens to Frank as a character, but invested.

Haslett moves deftly between the two, proving that Frank is not only capable of moving us to laughter, but possesses the ability to draw us deep inside his own pathos, however erratic and “eccentric” that pathos may be.

Graham serves as an instrument of grounding throughout the story, a means for the reader to gauge the reality of the situation(s). While Frank reminisces internally on Graham, (his “muse”) during the restaurant scene, recalling the “storage container, pancake press, tricycle engine, flying teddy bear,” Graham’s actions give the reader an alternative method for reading the moment: “Graham disagrees with me when I try to send back a second bottle of wine, apparently under the impression that one ought to accept spoiled goods in order not to hurt anybody’s feelings” (11).

Graham’s presence is vital to the lucidity of the story. Furthermore, it juxtaposes Frank’s narrative “flitting” as he bounces from present action to internal dialogue. Were Haslett to remove the moments of pathos from the story, I think the reader would become further and further alienated from Frank, perhaps to the point of exhaustion (as paralleled in Graham’s passing out on the bed in the hotel room.) The beauty in this story is the way the author forces us to take a step back (perhaps along with Graham) then reels us back in, slowly, purposefully.

As Graham sleeps on the hotel bed, Frank bends over his son, wiping drool from his mouth, cupping his “gentle face” in his hands. Upon reading such a touching passage, we find that forgiveness comes easy, that Frank’s mental illness is, in a sense, a way for the character to express his loneliness. Throughout the story, Frank encourages from his son the same kind of “eccentricity,” as though Frank is begging Graham to join him in his illness, to be his muse, to fuel his inventions. Where Graham sees his inherited disability as a curse, Frank views it as an extension of himself, a means to feel less estranged from the world.

“You have the chance to be with me,” Frank tells his son, “the things we’ll see!” (14). Without the pathos in the story, the reader would coast along from one zany idea/circumstance to the other. Thus, the story would become more of a parody, striving for the comic gimmick instead of bearing us along the “vast darkness” of Frank’s narrative ocean—an ocean that take us deeper into meaningful discourse.