Fiction - Critical analysis appreciated.

quincyk

I'd become embroiled in a bitter, tedious, dispute with some close-nit associates of mine. Perplexed by their habitual misgivings the previous month, I'd stated, vehemently - and courageously, I add- that their friendship, already one dying quite bloodily, I felt, did not garner the importance it once had done before, and that bar a miraculous decision on my own behalf, I would be rendering them strangers forthwith. They chortled initially, suggesting that I, in my infinite stubbornness, was merely being a pompous twit, and that time, just like all those other times, would heal any tear in the finely-sewn threads of companionship. I, on the other hand, had never been more certain of a decision in my thirty four years I'd graced the earth, and I was under no illusions that this was it - I'd finally had enough.

I left the pub, with the a cold bottle still firmly planted in my now shivering hand. A silent snow had fallen throughout the evening, much to my surprise, I hasten to add, and I vowed with absolute sincerity to myself that I would never return. I'd grown old within those walls, I'd choked through years of smoke blown by cancerous old-fogies, slipped on urine extracted from men who did not know who or what they were, and bore witness to the infinite weekend gatherings - where the incessant mutterings of classless divulgence in the life's of others were at their most bitterly frequent. Time had ran ahead of me, and I was stuck in a horrible routine, of which I now felt destined to butcher along with those who stood static at my side. I was young, too young for this grotesque spending of time, this wasteful, utterly pointless mundanity. Instead of escaping the noose, neatly fashioned by our own respective fingers, we happily tightened up, burrowing further into the seams of our own crumbling consciousness.

I steadily ventured through the dark passages of the night, that would lead me through barren streets, lying idle with a thick sheet of white covering up the world that was truth. The roaring winds menaced in from far beyond the oceans murkily lying in the outstretching plains of endless blue, eerily persistent in their influence on a night. They'd still be knocking back cheap shots of bourbon as I trudged ever nearer my home, I thought. There'd be Scott, languishing at the bar, a thin cigarette quivering between his loose lips, tightened only so he could spout nonsense to which ever unfortunate soul had wandered into ear-shot. Mike would be there too; the most likable of the four - hunched dreadfully in a pitiful charade of stone-wall silence, intermittently hunching over the table-tops to flicks specs of dirt to the grime of the floor. And then there was Henry. Ah yes, Henry Sands, the repugnant, absurd talisman of the group - his stoic , fractured smile an irrepressible annoyance on display, weekend after wicked, unmerciful weekend without fail. He regarded me, with my intelligible wit, and vast knowledge of life's finer arts, a close-friend, yet with a contempt that bordered on obsessive, such were his attempts to trip me up into floundering mistakes on my own behalf. I, on the other hand, at my most vehement, wished for his not-too-distant death, on many an occasion, and at my most sinister, with his boundless nuances, his hollow, stead-fast diatribes, had dreamed, many a time, of just exactly how he'd crumble to that irreparable mess we call death.


A line of thick ice coated the mirrors and side-edges of cars that stood imperiously in line, flanking the dank walls, the sculpted props to a masquerading dead night, serenaded by the drippings and the droppings from the gutters and the drains. It was well after three; but the hollow gold beaming down from the moon, suspending in the milky complexions of the sky as though hung, drawn and quartered from reality, gave the distant world below, with it's infinite horrors and disturbances, a timeless quality. Not a single light in my home was lit - the impregnable darkness blinding my versions of reality from my senses which, throughout the night, had been somewhat blighted by my steadily heavy intake of cheap ale. On nights like this, when the world seemed at it's most sparse - indeed at it's most innocent, I could sink down into the bowels of my own misery, and think about everything that had been, everything that may have been, and pondered why none of it ever came to be.


My mother had died ome four summers ago, lost in the her own world of psychotic, mental illness.
At times when I visited her, bound up in the endless corridors of St Anne's Psychiatric home, with it's endless white walled dens, and distant wailings, my arrival would spur her into a multitude of schizoid frenzies. At different stages I had died, I had come to smother her in my arms, I was the arrival of Christ, I was the son she'd wished she'd had. When I'd sat there staring into the perturbed eyes, enslaved into her egg-shell face, every crevice of her withering state, brought about by her ailing conscience, would clutch the vast cracks and lines of her face, and whisper death, death, death.

Matt Holck

where the incessant mutterings of classless divulgence in the life's of others were at their most bitterly frequent. ?

confused

Perplexed by their habitual misgivings the previous month, I'd stated, vehemently - and courageously, I add- that their friendship, already one dying quite bloodily, I felt, did not garner the importance it once had done before, and that bar a miraculous decision on my own behalf, I would be rendering them strangers forthwith.

too long -simplify

shorten setences
perhaps less of your meta observations - I hasten to say

quincyk

Matt Holck wrote: »

where the incessant mutterings of classless divulgence in the life's of others were at their most bitterly frequent. ?

confused

Worded incorrectly, methinks. Apologies. This is the first draft.

Matt Holck wrote: »

Perplexed by their habitual misgivings the previous month, I'd stated, vehemently - and courageously, I add- that their friendship, already one dying quite bloodily, I felt, did not garner the importance it once had done before, and that bar a miraculous decision on my own behalf, I would be rendering them strangers forthwith.

too long -simplify

shorten setences
perhaps less of your meta observations - I hasten to say

Depends on your style, imo. I like long sentences (Ballard, Fitzgerald), others prefer to use shorter ones (Buckowski, Frey etc)


Thanks, though.

Matt Holck

I like your style when it works
the long sentences can take the reader for a long fluid ride

however,
the audience knows not the twists and turns of the flow
and may loss track of the main sentence

I suggest breaking the sentences down
parsed "phrase by phrase"
to make sure the reader can navigate the structure.

quincyk

Matt Holck wrote: »

I like your style when it works
the long setences can that the reader for a long fluid ride

however,
the audiance knows not the twists and turns of the flow
and may loss track of the main sentence

I suggest breeaking the sentences down
parced "phrase by phrase"
to make sure the reader can navigate the structure.

All points taken into consideration.



Ta.