Reading Notes W16: The Cleaver Tree

This read was hard to follow. The author attempt to make sense of a night at a party which was bizarre and stodgy.  However, he found a way to make it interesting by making the best out of something that was uneventful, such as the tree, “…its distinctive features are exaggerated, and yet the substantial feel of its truck and curve of its branches, or again the way the tips of its leaves are elongated like a tail ---these are all grounded in realistic observation” (1120).  He made the tree for an interesting conversation. The party could be symbolic to the tree, perhaps, illustrating that although the party was boring, like the tree, he found a way to make the story of the party interesting to the reader. The tree was once the central conversation of the party for him, but now the debate between the architect and the beatnik poet, not the to mention the moments following it, is now the narrators point of conversation for the reader.  The authors language makes the party exciting and alluring just as he tried to do with the tree, “…. if I were to give a description of all that transpired that night, I would have to present this dialogue between poet and architect as a one-act play” (1122).  It was his way of fighting off boredom and at the same time the author keeps his readers captivated by making the story interesting by using the technique of dry humor to express that the party was so boring it was actually entertaining. He continued to introduce new characters such as the drunk girl in the Judo outfit and us picturing young admirers surrounded around a poet in a wheelchair while Agatha sat with the middle aged and elderly women casting pitying glances at them. The story, however, takes a weird turn… the narrator realizes the midnight party was organized entirely by patients in the mental institution where the party had taken place.