Writing Techniques

           One of the key writing techniques that I picked up in the short story, “Emergency” by Dennis Johnson was the ability to really imagine the character’s voices.  Instantly, just after reading the first sentence of the story, I could recognize the tone of the characters and what sort of person I was going to be “seeing.”  The reader is given the time and place the story is taking place, even though the main character is a tad ambiguous as are the details of when everything takes place.  We know the main character had been working in the emergency room for three works, it was the year 1973, and this was all, supposedly, “before the summer ended.”  The story is written in different time fragments based on the wording at the beginning of each paragraph, such as “I’d been working…” “I was hanging…” “Back in the O.R.,” or “Around 3:30 A.M…” etc. 

The time intervals seem to mesh into one another, the same effect nights in a hospital can have.  The first scenario begins with a guy coming into the emergency room with a knife stuck in his eye – everyone, even the patient, seem very calm about the incident admitting that his wife was the one who stabbed him, and “[he] didn’t want to call the police unless he died.”  The doctor doesn’t know what to do entirely, and everyone who has a specific position doesn’t even know how to directly respond to the emergency.  All the two main characters do is take more and more of Georgie’s pills that he sometimes steals from the hospital’s cabinets.  Thus, from this one sentence we are unsure whether the events taken place are hallucinations by the characters or if it is indeed reality. 

The narrative is mainly composed of constant dialogue between the main characters. We are given no other name for the main character other than his “unfortunate” nickname of “Fuckhead,” and his friend Georgie.  Throughout the entire story, Georgie cannot seem to remember exactly what time or place they are in, or he forgets certain events, which plays tribute to their drug usage.  The author, Dennis Johnson, works well to be able to teleport his readers swiftly to any place or time, even though some areas of the narrative leave one’s mind behind.  I feel that the confusion adds to the entirety of the story for a number of reasons mainly having to do with how one sees through the mind of drug addicts, or what it is like to be on drugs.  The events occur so quickly and haphazardly because of their condition.  At one point in the narrative, they are driving and Georgie accidently runs over a pregnant rabbit.  He tries to save the bunnies by cutting them from the mother’s stomach and talking about how he will raise them and take care of the bunnies; at the same time, the main character admits that he is unsure of how the rabbit got into the picture or whether it was from one time or another.  In any case, through the characters drug-induced moments, it shows another side of them that many people ignore when they picture “druggies.”  For instance, Georgie is tied to the idea of constantly wanting to save people.  Even if he imagines saving rabbits or people, or being empathetic in certain events in the hospital, he still thrives upon a philosophy on saving lives.  Thus, Dennis Johnson attracts readers through a different perspective that many writers do not take us through, while also incorporating a creative time and place combination that compliments what the characters are experiencing.