Personally, I started this summer with the works of who is becoming one of my favorite authors. Greg Froese introduced me to Cormac McCarthy a while back, and I dived into a couple of his novels this June, All the Pretty Horses and No Country for No Men. Based on those two reads I am might be John Grady Cole, the young cowboy protagonist of All the Pretty Horses. Not a bad guy to be, if you like horses and brunette daughters of hacienda owners. Well, unless you are not a fan of imprisonment in Mexican prison, corrupt officials, knife fights, and social bigotry. The good with the bad, right? I suppose I could be one of the three main characters from No Country for Old Men. I would lean toward Ed Tom Bell, the Texas sheriff who is thrown into the turmoil of a drug massacre and the carnage that follows the disappearance of a briefcase full of cash. He is an honorable man, and he simply wants to do what is right in a world where that is becoming more and more difficult. It makes him question who he is and whether he belongs there anymore. I would choose Ed Tom over Llewelyn Moss, the welder who stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad while on an early morning hunt and ends up walking away with a briefcase of cash that would change his life, and the lives of every person close to him, is the most horrible ways. He is not a bad guy; he is actually incredibly likable. However, his decision made in a briefest of moments, was ignorant and at the same time, innocently naive. I definitely would not choose to be Chirgurh. He is an assassin, and, surprisingly, he is the most principled of any character in the novel. He lives by a simple code, that he must keep his word and complete his given task, and he lives up to that code with cold dedication. One could say that is truly honorable. But then there is the whole killing people with an air-powered piston or a shotgun fitted with a makeshift silencer. He is also pretty creepy.
This week, I took a step away from McCarthy, although I do hope to continue reading ""The Border Trilogy" this summer; All the Pretty Horses is the first novel of the trilogy. I had to move away from McCarthy for a little while, despite how much I love what he writes. There is a long list of books I want and need to read, and the list just keeps growing. I decided to pull from that list Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I am only about halfway through the work, and I am enjoying it immensely, but it is, shall we say, odd. I find myself laughing at things that really should be funny, and I feel bad a a while until it happens again. If I am the protagonist of this novel, I am Billy Pilgrim. Billy bounces through times from one point in his life to another, "unstuck in time" as he calls it, and even spends time in an alien zoo after being abducted by an alien race who takes him aboard their flying saucer and whisks him away to their home planet. You know, the usual stuff. So far, Billy has proven to be an incompetent chaplain's assistant in WWII, an optometrist on the verge of a mental breakdown, a senile 40-something (according to his frustrated daughter), and pathetic prisoner of war. I do not like Billy. Granted, no one seems to like Billy. I guess I should finish the novel before I make an actual judgment.
What would "being" any of these characters say about me?
For now, I am going to be Ed Tom. That is the last book I finished reading. John Grady Cole is a cool dude, but I am too old to go riding off for the border, although there are days when that sounds pretty desirable.
That is the great thing about this little exercise: if I do not like who I am, based on the last book I read, I simply have to pick up another book. Problem solved.
So off I go to get unstuck in time with Billy. Who are you going to be?
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