Inner Voices

Three stories with a common theme are “Friends,” “Enemies” and “Dentist.” These are all stories about the bizarre ways that people perceive themselves—and in turn, how they attempt to control the ways in which others perceive them.

“Dentist” is the most significant example of this. Curt Lemon is terrified of the dentist. One initially feels some sort of pity for him—perhaps that incident, in some respect, led to his sadistic tendencies. What exactly the nature of his abuse was, we are not permitted to know. Instead, we see how Lemon has learned to cope with this. He feels that he must somehow compensate for his unmanly activity of fainting by suffering some sort of completely unnecessary pain—a penance of sorts. This sort of twisted reasoning process seems to be further indicative of some kind of abuse. We see that it is fulfilled for him in masochism—he asks the dentist to yank out a perfectly fine tooth. Lemon’s smile the next day seems to indicate brightly to all those around, “Look, you have nothing on me. You can no longer call me a coward.” No one was calling him a coward in the first place, but perhaps, for Lemon, this self-torture seems to quiet an inner voice.

In “Enemies,” Strunk steals a knife from Jensen. The audience isn’t permitted to know this until the end—when, by that point, it becomes a framing device: the punch line of an enormous joke. O’Brien chooses to situate us after the action has already happened so that we know only about as much as the author does while the fight breaks out between the two men. After Jensen breaks Strunk’s nose, he thinks that the latter is coming for him to visit some sort of vengeance on him. Jensen eventually breaks his own nose—once again, it is a case of being ruled by inner voices. Unbeknownst to Jensen, Strunk thinks that he deserved the initial punishment—or at least that it was warranted in some way—because he really did commit the crime against Jensen.

 In “Friends,” the aforementioned incident seems to bring together Strunk and Jensen. The two become a kind of comrades-in-arms and make a promise that one will kill the other if one sustains an injury that will surely kill them. Perhaps it seems like some sort of honorable thing—like a living will. Things change though—in the moment in which a mortar gravely injures Strunk. The injury makes Strunk cling all the more desperately to life. For this reason the promise Jensen initially makes to Strunk cannot be fulfilled. When he dies in the hospital, Jensen feels like his oath has not been broken. For some reason, it seems like whether or not he breaks the oath weighs more heavily on him than Strunk’s actual death.