Let's Talk Books: Triumph over the Grave by Denis Johnson

I know I literally was just talking about a short story from this collection a few days ago, but another one of the stories intrigued me. Honestly I wouldn't recommend it nearly as quickly as I would the Strangler Bob story, but it is interesting nonetheless. To go along with the theme of the other stories in the collection, death is a motif that keeps going on.

This story seems all over the place with the narrator recalling his relationships with all sorts of different people that he has met throughout his life, and often he starts talking about one person that leads into another story about someone else that lasts at least 5-7 pages, so its pretty hard to keep it all together!

Out of all his friends that he talks about throughout the story, the one that caught my attention the most is when he starts talking about his buddy Darcy. Darcy lives practically in the middle of nowhere, and when the narrator goes to visit him there is seemingly no one else around. Darcy seems somewhat of a lunatic because all he talks about are two other people that supposedly visit him all the time. The narrator gets a little creeped out about it but doesn't pursue the topic at all. Upon another return visit, the narrator discovers Darcy to have fallen and bleeding everywhere. He immediately gets him to the hospital where it is discovered he has spreading cancer growths all over his brain. The whole idea of him being "crazy" doesn't seem all that far fetched now! The narrator doesn't stay with Darcy through his final month, but the sadness and guilt of leaving his companion lasts throughout.

I thought the whole story was a little drawn on, but the ending is what really stuck with me. With so much unanticipated death in the narrator's life, he talks about his own mortality. This leads him with the final words that although he is alive at the time of writing, he may not be alive when we are reading it. This sticks even harder considering Denis Johnson died before the publication! Crazy stuff!