Independent Living by Jonathan Escoffery, 2017
The magic trick:
Drawing the reader into the narrator’s self-absorption before shocking us with a reminder of other characters’ concerns at the end of the story
Jonathan Escoffery’s Trelawney narrates several of the stories in his If I Survive You collection, including this story, and he does so with a particular style that mixes humor, an acute awareness of social strata, and a desperate kind of frustration. Mostly, though, it’s self-centered narration. Not self-aggrandizing at all, but just very much focused on his own situation. Consider that in this story, a man leaps out of his 10th-floor apartment to kill himself, and Trelawney reports it to the reader only as it may affect the things he’s worried about.
So when the plot moves in such a way that by story’s end Trelawney is finally forced to grapple with the concerns of other people around him, it’s a shock to his system. It’s a shock for the reader, too, because even if we recognize his self-centered tendencies from the start, his narration has locked us into focusing on his concerns only. We, too, suddenly realize at the end: my goodness, these were people too.
And that’s quite a trick on Escoffery’s part.
The selection:
Since Carlos is the last tenant who hasn’t filled out his paperwork, I’ve had time enough to scrutinize his file and realize he has good reason for avoiding me: on last year’s Employment Verification form, Carlos’s signature is at the bottom, and on the line that asks, Are you currently employed? Carlos wrote, No.
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