Analysis of "Emergency" and "Escort"

Voice was very apparent in Denis Johnson’s story “Emergency” and Chuck Palahniuk’s story “Escort.” Though both stories were very short, they captured and took on their weight and presence through the use of well-established voices. Both Johnson and Palahniuk were established writers when they published these stories and had spent a long time developing and sharpening their voices in order to produce such potent short stories.

In Johnson’s story, the voice came through in the strange and overt dialogue. An example is when Georgie takes the knife out of the patient’s eye: “‘Where,’ the doctor finally asked, ‘did you get that?’ Nobody said one thing more, not for quite a long time. But after a while, one of the ICU nurses said, ‘Your shoelace is untied.’ Georgie laid the knife on a chart and bent down to fix his shoe.” The scene that Johnson created was very much done through his use of voice and the way that he presented the scene without any gaps but still created something interesting and memorable.

Voice also came though in Johnson’s story in his characters. He made people in his story act in ways that came as a sort of slight shock but not so much that they seemed unbelievable. The voice carried the story past any ideas or worries about inconsistency and I was left completely believing that the characters existed somewhere in the world.

Palahniuk’s story was not driven with dialogue but instead with an insane amount of knowledge and detail about an interesting and obscure scenario. Palahniuk is known for his absurd stories and I think one of the main reasons that they are so successful is because he spends the majority of his time on a story doing research and experimenting and investigating the topics very thoroughly before he writes. Another thing Palahniuk succeeded in with driving the story was making the character do weird things. He goes to church with someone he doesn’t really know then actually takes a note off the little tree and actually does what it says and that is what makes it a story. One of my biggest pet peeves is when everyone gets so set on why. If we knew all the why’s of any given story it would fail to be a story anymore. “Why?” is a valid question but should not be investigated too hard, it should be skimmed like the extra foam off of a class of beer then forgotten about as the reader lets the story quench their thirst. Palahniuk does that well by giving just enough information: “I was desperate enough to go.” But doesn’t give the reader too much and lets them fill in the blanks themselves.

For both of the writers, confidence is what voice is boiled down and refined to. A voice comes from knowing a story or a character or a place so well that it creates itself. If a writer finds out about a story as they write it, great things can come about, but often the voice can waver and there will be a lot of editing. Voice also knows when to break rules and when to follow them, all of it being rooted in knowing the story so well that no one could find fault in it.