Response to Denis Johnson's Emergency

     I have always had this notation that working in an emergency room is weird, but this puts everything into a dynamically interesting perspective. Georgie thew me off a bit to start, but his characterization of being some weird, drug addict makes for a complimentary nurse, or whatever his official position may be. The conversation Georgia has with his shoes was the deciding factor for me in deciding his sanity, a great literary tool used in an effective way. Finding out that the narrator too was sharing the pills that Georgia would steal is an interesting contrast, as the main character initially seemed like a responsible ER worker. 

When the man with the knife in his eye came in I was expecting the first first emergency situation in the story, but instead it was more of a relaxed type of emergency, as the man describes himself casually walking in after having a knife stuck in his left eye. “ I just walked in. It’s only three blocks.” This conversation threw me off a bit, but made sense in context as a completely off-the-wall excerpt, as most of the story is. 

Ironically, the many emergencies within the story are not treated as such, a clever trick to give this short story a sense of humor. Something I would take from this story to use in my future pieces is the casual conversation among characters. Most notably between the narrator and Georgie, everything that was said seemed to reach out in a casual manner, despite sometimes having bad consequences, such as the rabbit incident. After saying that the narrator completely forgot about the baby rabbits taken from it’s mother, he states that, “They slid around behind me and got squashed..., Deceased.” One of the more gruesome moments, this bods well with the other crazy situations the narrator and Georgie put themselves in. 

The imagery was never explained too much, but was not a major concentration in this piece. The crazy night of two drug addicts makes for an interesting structure as well, with simply a few pages of background leading into an adventure of death and a drive-in movie. 

Hardee, the hitchhiker, never made much sense to me. I was unsure of his purpose, although he was in an emergency which also engages the theme of the story again. Johnson did a nice job of constructing a piece full of random events that were vaguely similar in a surprising way.