#actually at some point i'm defo gonna do something abt him and sonia in hospital i fucking loVVVEDDD THAT
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eddie kasprzak, reactionary extraordinaire
both balloons tethered to the microfilm recorder now read ASTHMA MEDICINE GIVES YOU CANCER! below the slogan are grinning skulls.
eddie’s characterisation flooding its way into the third person narrator in the book ESPECIALLY in eddie’s bad break is amazing and i’d die for it. his voice elsewhere in the book is very poetic and looks at things more conceptually than solidly, but the more of a grounding in this chapter while his head runs wild continues and tries to comprehend such a horrible conversation (specifically looking at his convo with mr keene in eddie’s bad break p2) succeeds so much to solidify him as a character outside of just what he says and does. i love it so here’s an entire collection that shows his reactions and the intensity he reaches as he buries himself in his brain in such a difficult situation and how it’s integrated into the prose in such a way we really feel like we’re living in his head despite the third person gap we have to cross to get there.
‘Mr Keene,' he says, and his voice sounds distant to his own ears, without power. 'It was Mr Keene.'
'Not exactly the nicest man in Derry,' Mike says, but Eddie, lost in his thoughts, barely hears him.
... eddie always always has a whole thing of trying to be brave (and in this chapter he’s always saying something along the lines of what would big bill do?) but, in the process, manages to get so worked up he’s at a disconnect to what’s actually going on. as he starts to recall the memory with the rest of the losers 27 years later, he starts retreating into his own head because that’s simply how he is. he’s such a thinker that even the second he says it, he’s fading out. he barely hears him. this follows on as he recalls the memory and it’s contrary to the rest of the book where, normally, since we see eddie through someone else’s eyes (third person limited omniscient since the book is made up of multiple third person narrations), we only really see him being quiet as opposed to the actual physical disconnect we see when it is an eddie third person limited in complicated moments.
Mr Keene sat down in the swivel chair behind his desk and took one. Then he opened his drawer and took something out. He put it down next to the tall bottle of licorice whips and Eddie felt real alarm course through him. It was an aspirator. Mr Keene tilted back in his swivel chair until his head was almost touching the calendar on the wall behind him. The picture on the calendar showed more pills. It said SQUIBB. And —
— and for one nightmare moment, when Mr Keene opened his mouth to speak, Eddie remembered what had happened in the shoe store when he was just a little kid, when his mother had screamed at him for putting his foot in the X-ray machine. For that one nightmare moment Eddie thought Mr Keene would say: 'Eddie, nine out of ten doctors agree that asthma medicine gives you cancer, just like the X-ray machines they used to have in the shoe stores. You've probably got it already. Just thought you ought to know.'
... he struggles to stay in the moment and this is just how he is his whole life. i’m gonna reference it chapter two for a second but the fact that his job in that version was a risk analyst? god send, they really hit the nail on the head for what they were trying to do in that interpretation there and i totally see how they got to it because risk analysing is just what he does. in this part where he sits down with mr keene, the convo hasn’t even begun. no one’s said a word and yet the second mr keene shows promise of saying anything, mr active imagination risk analyst eddie kasprzak has already thought up everything and dreamt himself into oblivion. scenarios exist without ever fully existing and in any given moment he’s already left reality and hopped onto another universe where the worst has just or will just happen.
Mr Keene wrapped a bunched, bony, liverspotted hand around the balloon and squeezed. The balloon bulged over and under his fist and Eddie winced, trying to get ready for the pop. Simultaneously he felt his breathing stop altogether. He leaned over the desk and grabbed for the aspirator on the blotter. His shoulder struck the heavy ice-cream-soda glass. It toppled off the desk and shattered on the floor like a bomb.
Eddie heard that only dimly. He was clawing the top off the aspirator, slamming the nozzle into his mouth, triggering it off. He took a tearing heaving breath, his thoughts a ratrun of panic as they always were at moments like this: Please Mommy I'm suffocating I can't BREATHE oh my dear God oh dear Jesus meekandmild I can't BREATHE phase I don't want to die don't want to die oh please —
Then the fog from the aspirator condensed on the swollen walls of his throat and he could breathe again.
'I'm sorry,' he said, nearly crying. 'I'm sorry about the glass . . . I'll clean it up and pay for it . . . just please don't tell my mother, okay? I'm sorry, Mr Keene, but I couldn't breathe —
... gets very caught up on one thing. he does this whole whole chapter. it goes on in the next quote here ...
'Good,' Mr Keene said. 'We have an understanding. And you feel much better now, don't you?'
Eddie nodded.
'Why?'
'Why? Well . . . because I had my medicine.' He looked at Mr Keene the way he looked at Mrs Casey in school when he had given an answer he wasn't quite sure of.
'But you didn't have any medicine,' Mr Keene said. 'You had a placebo.A placebo, Eddie, is something that looks like medicine and tastes like medicine but isn't medicine. A placebo isn't medicine because it has no active ingredients. Or, if it is medicine, it's medicine of a very special sort. Head-medicine.' Mr Keene smiled. 'Do you understand that, Eddie? Head-medicine.'
Eddie understood, all right; Mr Keene was telling him he was crazy. But through numb lips he said, 'No, I don't get you.'
... it’s hard to understand that this is the truth, let alone why he’s being told this. obviously eddie’s determined on the fact that he’s not crazy, but the main part up until this point i got caught up on was his continued disconnect and mostly passive not wanting to change at all attitude so he can get out of there. the numb lips and the references before to having his voice being distant, him constantly disappearing off into the tangents his head brings him on. there’s few and far between moments where he actually responds in between mr keene telling him what he’s telling him, and the prose between that is him thinking (panickingly thinking), filled with him trying to dream up other things and trying to ground himself in thinks he can compare the unfamiliar to. i especially love the cut in, in the first quote that sk puts through the whole book of another narration coming straight from eddie’s head. the stream of panic to really push it through.
Eddie said: 'My medicine does so work.'
'I know it does,' Mr Keene replied, and smiled a maddening complacent grownup's smile. 'It works on your chest because it works on your head. HydrOx, Eddie, is water with a dash of camphor thrown in to give it a medicine taste.'
'No,' Eddie said. His breath had begun to whistle again.
Mr Keene drank some of his soda, spooned some of the melting ice cream, and fastidiously wiped his chin with his handkerchief while Eddie used his aspirator again.
'I want to go now,' Eddie said.
'Let me finish, please.'
'No! I want to go, you've got your money and I want to go!'
...
'I'm not crazy,' Eddie whispered, the words coming out in a bare husk.Mr Keene's chair creaked like a monstrous cricket. 'What?''I said I'm not crazy!' Eddie shouted. Then, immediately, a miserable blush rose into his face.
... the moment the panic finally takes over and becomes enough. strangely (thought it makes total sense when thinking about how internal eddie is versus when he’s finally had enough and gets pushed over the edge) he really does lash out. he’s immediately embarrassed that he’s done it, but he does do it. he switches from the passive life line carrying on in his brain he’s hoping will carry him out of the situation, and tries to get out of it before the emotional gets too much and really tries to put a stop to it. all in good time, too, because when eddie finally does leave ...
Eddie's brain thudded and whirled. Oh, he felt sick, he felt very sick.
...
He slipped it into his pocket and watched the traffic pass back and forth, headed up Main Street and down Up-Mile Hill. He tried not to think. The sun beat down on his head, blaringly hot. Each passing car threw bright darts of reflection into his eyes, and a headache was starting in his temples.
... emphasis on the sensory and the physical manifestations of his emotions. he feels so strongly and the physical ramifications comes as a result of his anxiety. his head aches, his ‘asthma’ is acting up. of course he takes his inhaler but a few moments later and ...
He looked fixedly at the aspirator, unaware of the old lady who glanced curiously at him as she passed on down the hill toward Main Street with her shopping basket over her arm. He felt betrayed. And for one moment he almost cast the plastic squeeze bottle into the gutter — better yet, he thought, throw it down that sewer– grating. Sure! Why not? Let It have it down there in Its tunnels and dripping sewer-pipes. Have a pla–cee-bo, you hundred-faced creep! He uttered a wild laugh and came within an ace of doing it. But in the end, habit was simply too strong. He replaced the aspirator in his right front pants pocket and walked on, hardly hearing the occasional blare of a horn or the diesel drone of the Bassey Park bus as it passed him. He was likewise unaware of how close he was to discovering what being hurt — really hurt — was all about.
... this is straying away from the actual point of the post slightly, but, as it says, habit remains too strong. he’s a character that almost always returns to the ‘comfortable’, though familiar is actually a much better word for it. to return to the point of the post in regards to this, though this time the technique isn’t exclusive to eddie centric chapters, all of the losers get cut in moments of it, i especially love eddie’s thought process tied into this moment straight up verbatim. though it’s tragic that he doesn’t follow through and chuck the aspirator down the drain (though completely understandable too), this moment ties into everything else we see of the intricacies of eddie’s inner world and how it’s obviously a full one. he really does live up there. humouring any and all possibilities no matter how out there or terrible they may seem is something that he constantly does, it’s who he is. eddie lives in the hypothetical. i think this chapter really demonstrates that and lets eddie’s discomfort become so overwhelming that it’s so difficult to even pay attention to what’s going on which totally brings us into eddie’s psyche. concentrating is difficult when you could run upstairs and live there. it’s comfortable, it’s familiar, and it doesn’t really hurt as much as the real.
#* they'll eat me alive#essentially: eddie vc shut up i got anxiety#i just really think sk deserves credit here he really did write this chapter so well#it could easily stand alone as a short story but also manages to fit so seamlessly into the plot despite having a whole world around it#and you did this for what?#anyway just thinking about my favourite character in the world#actually at some point i'm defo gonna do something abt him and sonia in hospital i fucking loVVVEDDD THAT#so well written so well executed#long post /
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