Conroy's "Stop-Time"

Sorry about being a bit late in posting this...

Conroy's use of the jazz stop-time technique is evident in his chapters when he creates a different section by adding a space between the paragraphs. He then switches from past tense to present tense, bringing the reader from an adult’s reflection to a child’s experience. It took a bit of getting used to because it caused the entire chapter, much less the entire book, to switch paces. In chapter two, there’s a significant tense and story change when Conroy shifts from talking about Jean to Tobey and then back to Jean again. He explains Jean’s background in order to explain why Jean is the way he is. To do this, Conroy also explains Jean’s siblings to show how he worried about Jean’s unstable mentality, because siblings are a good indication of what Jean could become.

On page 32, Conroy shifts from past tense while explaining Jean’s string of temporary jobs, to present tense about waking up on Victor’s Jean’s brother, couch. There is a sense of rising and falling action when Conroy wakes up to discover Victor had come in the living room to his desk. Conroy knew not to move or let on that he was awake because a sort of sixth sense had warned him of danger. The scene is tense as he waits to see what Victor was going to do. When Victor screams and falls to the floor, Conroy leaps from the couch and runs outside, only to crash into a parked car and pass out, seeing stars swirl around him like in a cartoon. The tension provides the rising and falling action with the scene starting with Conroy waking up, the tension mounting as he registers the danger and waits to see what happens, and then falling action when he reaches the climax of leaping from the couch and ending by passing out. It begins and ends by him being unconscious, bringing the scene full circle. After this, the narration returns to past tense as he describes how Jean leeched from his and Alison’s child support checks.

In the scene, Conroy describes his emotions in order to increase tension and uneasiness. He writes, “Uneasiness creeps forward from the back of my head, waking me with a silent danger signal. Don’t move! Don’t make a sound!”He then increases the uneasiness by describing what was happening to Victor and his scream before Conroy runs from the couch and out of the house while only in his underwear. The impact of the entire scene, though, wasn’t his realization of Jean’s family being crazy. He realized that the entire world was crazy because of his collision with the parked car. That moment connected the readers, and thus the world, to a situation that could have been but a singular moment otherwise.

I think that because of the madness Conroy grew up in, he only knew how to function when the world was crazy. In the case of framing his story with his car crash, the reader sees that he is ecstatic when the car loses control and he careens into a fountain. It was a moment where everything was thrown out of his control and he felt alive, even though he also thought he was about to die. His relaxation before the car hits the fountain was taught to him while growing up. When things go crazy, just go with it. “Let it come.” If such uncontrollable craziness is all he’s ever known, then he would welcome it. My mentor wanted me to read “Writing Short Stories” by Flanner O’Connor. She states that a story is driven by meaning. That telling a story is the only way to make someone else understand something. In this case, I think that the entire narration between the prologue and the epilogue is a means of describing his reaction to that one car wreck.