Sample: CanLit Essay

“More Than an Outline and Music”:
Identity as Fractured in Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter

In the novel Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje illustrates fractured identity through the lives and interactions of the characters. We glimpse small parts of their lives at a time, occasionally from the slightly skewed viewpoint of the primary character Buddy Bolden. We learn of his descent into madness at the beginning of the novel, and this piece of information notifies us that his perception of the world may be fallible and/or inaccurate at times. As he is the central focus of the novel, Bolden is the main example of a fractured identity but this concept is equally exemplified in the lives of those around him such as secondary characters like Tom Pickett, The Brewitts, and Webb. Concerning Slaughter, to view anyone’s identity as intact is an impossible desire: the novel itself is fragmented and reveals only small pieces of information at a time. One’s identity is comprised by whom they know and people’s opinions of them, and is portrayed as fractured in Coming Through Slaughter through the format of the prose as well at through the characters’ affects on and interactions with one another.

The format in which Slaughter is written--with its temporal leaps and narrative shifts that often change the reader’s perspective quickly--aids its portrayal of identity as fractured. The beginning of the novel is set years after Bolden’s death, but soon leaps back to the height of his career, then to his disappearance, before sliding back to when he married Nora (Ondaatje Coming Through Slaughter 2, 6, 13, 19). Within seventeen pages, time elapses over many years, during which Bolden reverts from being long buried to healthy and alive, changing from a successful barber and musician to a shadow on the brink of insanity. The history of Tom Pickett is revealed in a similarly abstract fashion, as the reader learns that he is physically and mentally scarred before glimpsing him as he was before Bolden’s attack. Pickett’s identity of the moment retrogrades as the story progresses, giving us a fragment of the man he once was before narrating how his persona was drastically altered in that brief expanse of time (68-72). There is no linearity on which to build concrete concepts of identity because of the temporal leaps that alter given facts along with the reader’s perception. What may be true at an instant may be rendered false or seen as inconceivable on the previous or next page. Thus it is impossible to shape finalized concepts of any character’s identity, because the temporal changes from scene to scene are apt to bring with them corresponding changes in the characters. There are also frequent changes in the narrative voice, creating gaps and possible incongruities in the history relayed. Each character offers a different perspective on events that occur. One example of a conflict in narrative personas is shown when Bolden goes crazy in the parade. Cornish is horrified, while Bolden seems relieved and welcomes his collapse (132). The reader is left to interpret which view of Bolden’s mentality is more correct and how his identity may have changed at that point. It is due to the frequent shifts in narrative voice and time that identity is shown as relative to an instant and therefore fractured, like a snapshot capturing the light of a single moment.

Identity is also shown to be dependent on the people one keeps company with, causing it to be fractured because different masks are presented to different crowds. Webb comments that Bolden “had lived a different life with every one of them [his family and friends]” (60). No one person or group, not his band, his clients, his wife or his children had ever seen every aspect of Buddy Bolden’s identity. This is equally applicable for those that surround him, as shown by reflections on their lives. When Bolden lives with the Brewitts, the three of them progress through “Jaelin and Robin. Jaelin and Robin and Bolden. Robin and Bolden” (62). They each get parts of one another but those parts change hands, disappear, or are replaced. In this respect, identity is illustrated as fractured - it alters because the nature of relationships dictates what facets of one’s identity are revealed. Bolden never sees the extent of Jaelin’s sexual side as it is reserved for Robin, just as Will Cornish never personally witnesses the extent of Bolden’s violent nature. Bellocq portrays another example of a fractured identity, as other characters’ opinions of him vary because of his different relationships with each of them. He and Bolden are intimate friends who “talked for hours” (61) and share a private world. However, Nora sees Bellocq as physically resembling “something squashed or run over by a horse” (124) and she “hated him” (127) for a number of reasons. Consequently those two characters do not associate intimately, nor do they present their qualities reserved for cherished relationships to the other. Different sides of the same character’s identity are observed in different situations, causing others to form their opinions of them based on the events they witness.

Experiences with the other characters--or occurrences in the plot--maintain the idea of identity as fractured because experiences alter and can even shatter a person’s psyche. “Nora’s Song” (11) can be viewed as a haunting illustration of the changes that Nora’s identity undergoes between her first meeting of Bolden and when he returns home from his absence. The long break between “over town/and then/dragging his bone home” (11) shows the fracturing of her identity between his disappearance and return. In a more positive change, when young Bolden and Webb get their apartment in Pontchartrain they “gradually paste their characters onto each other” (30). Both Webb and Bolden’s identities are rearranged because of their encounter and subsequent habitation with the other. Their individual identities quickly grow to be so blended that they become the other person, with Webb becoming introverted while Bolden becomes the well known public figure. In a more negative occurrence, Tom Pickett is psychologically altered for the worse when Bolden attacks him with the razor (70-72). This incident illustrates a definitive break, or separation, in identity: Pickett was widely admired and very sociable before the attack but presently gains a derogatory reputation because of its effects, as it causes a completely opposite character to form. After the attack he is reclusive, disfigured, and living a life of filth, for which people mockingly call him the “Fly King” (114). This is a sharp contrast to his past, as he was previously regarded as “one of the great hustlers, one of the most beautiful men in the District” (68). Here we see a drastically fractured identity, where it is not only cracked and shifted because of experience but some pieces are broken clean away and destroyed due to an overwhelmingly traumatic event.

Different degrees of this fracturing of identity are found throughout Coming Through Slaughter, with some examples being more extreme than others. Bolden is the most apparent archetype of such, as he is the focal point of the novel. However, the secondary characters also exhibit types of and reasons for fractured identity; we observe pieces of their characters coming “down to us in fragments” (2) as their identities undergo various changes throughout the progression of the narrative. Identity is shown as fractured in several ways, most frequently through the prose’s shifting narrators and its sometimes vast temporal leaps. Equally telling are the varying interactions and relationships between the characters, along with the experiences that significantly alter their lives. This semi-biographical fiction written about a relatively unknown man (who goes insane) is a good setting for Michael Ondaatje to illustrate the concept that people who are considered normal have identities that are equally fragmented as those who are mentally unstable.






Works Cited:
Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter. 1976. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1998.