B
BicycleTragedy
I have a question about the italicized chapter of Factotum, where he describes going to the track with Jan and encountering a stubborn old man whom he eventually attacks over an argument regarding seating...(the scene was SOMEWHAT interpreted theatrically in the film version)...
Is he implying that he may have really killed this guy? If memory serves (I rented the book from the library a couple of months back and cannot reference it now) he describes eventually dropping the man quite a ways down beneath the grandstand, and watching his body bounce several times and go limp.
But then in the next chapter he implies to the reader, via recounting a conversation with Jan about the previous day's fateful trip to the races, that the scene was imagined, conceived in his head out of a drunken haze. Yet he finds the previous day's race results in the paper that day, and they match his recollection of the event.
So, did I read this wrong, or am I just really gullible, or did he kill the guy, or what?
In the film version, he breaks up with Jan out of general disgust and nausea, but in the book, the decision to leave is directly related to his behavior at the track, regarding the assault.
I'm a new-ish Buk fan but I am trying to read everything I can find by him; yet I do not know his style well enough to know if the above-described scene was meant to be taken as surrealism or what. So please forgive my idiocy and offer me some insight.
Is he implying that he may have really killed this guy? If memory serves (I rented the book from the library a couple of months back and cannot reference it now) he describes eventually dropping the man quite a ways down beneath the grandstand, and watching his body bounce several times and go limp.
But then in the next chapter he implies to the reader, via recounting a conversation with Jan about the previous day's fateful trip to the races, that the scene was imagined, conceived in his head out of a drunken haze. Yet he finds the previous day's race results in the paper that day, and they match his recollection of the event.
So, did I read this wrong, or am I just really gullible, or did he kill the guy, or what?
In the film version, he breaks up with Jan out of general disgust and nausea, but in the book, the decision to leave is directly related to his behavior at the track, regarding the assault.
I'm a new-ish Buk fan but I am trying to read everything I can find by him; yet I do not know his style well enough to know if the above-described scene was meant to be taken as surrealism or what. So please forgive my idiocy and offer me some insight.