BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 11: Jacob The Obscure

Well, okay, so here's book 2, which is predictably narrated by Jacob. We got a hint of this at the end of Eclipse, and call me crazy, but I'm willing to give him a try. Appropriately, I think the wedding was the beginning of the end of my love affair with Bella-as-narrator. In the comments last time, Xocolatl mentioned Bella's double betrayal of our trust: she didn't want to be married until she just did, she didn't want to have a baby until she just did. On both occasions, she just "sees the light" or some bullshit, there isn't even a reasonable explanation. The "little nudger" was just the last straw. (The little nudger, by the way. Dear has the best joke Re: Little Nudger so far.)

In high school I loved the novel The River Why, which is a meditation on various Western philosophies including but not limited to fly fishing. The narrator goes off and lives in the wilderness and tries to reconcile the different worldviews of his parents as well as the worldviews of various people he meets. He ends up encountering a skinny-dipping manic pixie dream girl in the river behind his cabin, and we're off to the races. (Every young man's dream is to run into a naked MPDG on the side of a river one day, though preferably not a dead one, Bridge To Terebithia-style.) It is, among other things, an environmentalist novel that was originally published by the Sierra Club. Unfortunately, it takes a weird Right turn toward the end, when the narrator finds god more literally than Bella has (so far). It's jarring and unexpected, and every time I mentally revisit the book it drops a little more in my estimation because of that turn. It wraps up with a Vietnam-bashing coda though, so maybe it's a wash.

I like to tell myself that what bothers me about The River Why and Bella's recent transformation is that it feels disingenuous in a narrative sense and not that it offends my personal sensibilities. I can't be sure about that, of course. But the point is, for whatever reason, I welcome a break from Bella.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I hate me some Jacob too. But whatever, it can't get worse. Plus I'm assuming we'll come back to Bella sooner or later (though it would be kind of audacious if we didn't, if that was the last glimpse of her "subconscious mind" we got and we only experienced her in the third person from now on. Especially if she becomes a vampire-- it would keep the minds and inner-lives of vampires unknowable. But I doubt that will happen).

Epigraph

Another epigraph! On page 142! You crazy for this one, Steph.

And yet, to say the truth,

reason and love keep little company together nowadays.

Well, we all knew Shakespeare was going to show up here sooner or later. What's amusing to me is I have frequently invoked A Midsummer Night's Dream as a counterpoint to Twilight in general and Eclipse specifically, given that Midsummer also involves love triangles and love spells which are not unlike imprinting. Of course, where Midsummer is simultaneously making clever points about love and superstition, Twilight never makes any clever points about anything. Why continue to invite the unflattering comparison?

Especially since this is about as bland a sentiment as one could find in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Throw a dart at the folio and you're liable to find a more insightful passage. It also doesn't tell us anything new about Jacob or what he'll be getting into; "irrational love" is practically his middle name. This epigraph does nothing for me.

Preface

What's weird here is that there's sort of another epigraph: "Life sucks, and then you die" in the middle of the page in italics. Why so many epigraphs, Jacob? Is it to indicate that Jacob isn't as good at book-writin' as Bella? Whatever, the point is we are mostly spared a flash-forward to nothing. (What was that first preface supposed to be, by the way? A flash-forward to that dream where Bella became fiercely-pro life? Can you really flash-forward to a dream, outside of Inception?) "Yeah, I should be so lucky," Jacob says, and that's the whole preface. RIMSHOT.

"Did someone say 'rimjob'?"-Alice Cullen

ANOTHER RIMSHOT.

Chapter 8: Waiting For The Damn Fight To Start Already

We're changing up just the right amount here; Avon Barksdale would approve. We've got this longer, weirder chapter title, we've got Jacob essentially blowing off the preface, and we didn't switch fonts or do anything stupid like that. So far so okay.

We start at Jacob's house, he's arguing with Paul over a bag of Doritos. Paul is in his house because, we learn pretty quickly, Jacob's sister Rachel has recently returned from college and Paul has imprinted on her. OH SNAP. The wolves are always bringing the interpersonal drama. So now every time Jacob switches to wolf form he's bombarded with images of one of his friends banging his sister in all kinds of high-powered, lupine ways (one assumes, anyway). Whereas there are basically no drawbacks to being a vampire (no matter what anyone says), the drawbacks of wolf-dom are almost too numerous to name. You get to keep your soul, so the fuck what? At these prices, you can have my soul!

They argue about nothing for about three seconds before Paul crushes the Doritos on purpose and Jacob pretends to give up and then punches Paul in the face and breaks his nose. Paul calls him an idiot and Jacob takes the bag of Doritos away. I'm feeling a little... deflated here. The sex in the last few chapters was underwhelming but now we're just watching two assholes bicker over Doritos? (Also: the wolfpack seems like the group of guys you see at a bar who are all shouting at the top of their voices and aggressively slapping each other on the back and shit, freaking everybody out and ruining the whole vibe.)

"Watching" is the operative word here, because we're not really in Jacob's head (yet). Okay, sure, Bella had a 800-or-so-page head start on Jacob in terms of establishing her voice, and it's not as though Jacob's narration sounds like Bella; it doesn't. There are notably shorter sentences (though only in bursts, like every fifth paragraph S. Meyer remembers she's writing in the voice of a new character) and significant influx of "stupid guy" dialect. (Jacob talks about "when Rachel'd come home" and talks about being made "real sympathetic" to the troubles of his fellow wolves. Later he says "bada bing, bada boom"!) The problem is that despite S. Meyer's cosmetic efforts, we're still seeing Jacob more or less in the third person. It doesn't sound like Bella, it sounds like no one.

I stood there for a second, and then I stalked off to my room, muttering about alien abductions.

Why aren't we hearing specifically what Jacob is muttering? Isn't he our narrator? Is he not even listening to himself? So these first few pages were apparently supposed to show us how miserable Jacob is, but all of this problems seem incredibly petty. When he wonders if "a bullet through [his] temple" would actually kill him or just leave "a really big mess" to clean up, it feels crass and unearned. Your friend is dating your sister and you didn't get the girl you like. That's it! On the other hand, you're functionally immortal and can heal from wounds almost instantly. Try to see the nice forest instead of those two shitty trees, dude.

(Now I'm thinking of that horrible Wolverine movie, where if you can heal instantly and you catch a bullet in the head it just erases your memory. Maybe Jacob should actually give it a shot, PUN SO INTENDED.)

Jacob spends a while in his room imagining all the different ways he and the rest of Forks will be informed of Bella's "death," since he assumes she won't be returning to Forks ever again. He's bothered by the fact that he won't even know if Bella is successfully vamped or not. "Maybe he'd smashed her like a bag of chips in his drive to get some," he says, which is a callback to Paul crushing the Doritos bag from like 200 words ago. Uh-oh, is that bag of Doritos going to be like, the central motif of this section?

Discuss the symbolic significance of Jacob's Doritos bag.

Sorry, I just want to remember that for when I publish my Twilight Reader's Guide. (CALL ME, PUBLISHERS!) Jacob cycles through violent fantasies--is he jerking off or something?-- the Cullen house burning down, the Cullens subbing in charred bodies for their own and making a clean getaway. He weirdly connects it with his mother's death; she died in a car crash, which is another scenario he imagines. He assumes the funeral will be closed-casket. "My mom's coffin had been nailed shut..." he says. Is S. Meyer just trying to get us to empathize right now or is it going to turn out that Jacob's mom is a vampire? I'm not sure if that would be good or not.

Anyway, Jacob moves from fantasizing about Bella's death to fantasizing about hunting down and killing the Cullens, making use of his extra long life to really do a job of it. "If you had forever, you could check out every single piece of straw in the haystack, one by one, to see if it was the needle." Interesting metaphor, except the Cullens will be moving around. So any number of of pieces of straw you once checked could become the needle at any time. Maybe this is just more of S. Meyer establishing Jacob is stupid? Also: this is really creepy! Note to S. Meyer: hearing an obsessive psychopath plot murders is not amusing!

"We could go tonight," Jacob says. "We could kill every one of them that we could find." SHUT UP JACOB. I will not have you hurting Alice. Or Jasper. The rest of them are fair game, actually. But Sam Uley has apparently forbid that until they know for sure that Bella has been bitten. Then it's "game on." So okay, I guess we know what's next.

Apparently wolves have super-sensitive hearing, so there's kind of a nice break here where Jacob describes everything he can hear in the mile or so radius from his house (This is when a sense of him as a narrator starts to develop). He talks about the last bend in the road where you can finally see the beach-- "The La Push cops liked to hang out right around there. Tourists never noticed the reduced speed limit sign on the other side of the road." The speed limit sign is on the OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD? What kind of crazy signage laws do they have on the Reservation?

When he hears Paul laughing in the other room, he heads down to the beach, annoyed. If you're like me, you are sitting here going, Hey, S. Meyer hasn't done anything outrageous in like, a dozen pages. Well, wait no more, because who should Jacob run into but Quil and his imprint victim Claire, who is THREE FUCKING YEARS OLD. What follows is, unbelievably, a scene that is supposed to play as cute. Jacob talks to Quil while Claire prattles on in an adowabow baby voice. We just learned a few sentences ago that there are, in fact, police officers on the Reservation. So that answers one question, but raises another: WHY THE FUCK AREN'T THEY DOING THEIR JOBS?

Quil and Claire are playing by the water-- Quil's holding her upside down by the ankle. He lets her down and she runs to the approaching Jacob. Good instinct, Claire! Keep running! "Where's your mama?" Jacob asks. Good question, Jake!

"Gone, gone, gone," Claire sang, "Cwaire pway wid Qwil aaawl day. Cwaire nebber gowin home."

Ugh. So her mom's a deadbeat, which explains a lot. Secondly, how WIDICKUWUS is that child-speak up there? It goes on, and on, and on, and on. So does the disconcerting "speaking in the third-person" thing (this chapter has layers upon layers of third-person problems). The reasons for calling child protective services just get more and more NUMAWUS. Jacob watches Quil dote on Claire, calling him an "abused nanny." He says it's "puke-inducing." RIGHT ON. But he's talking about the "peace and certainty" radiating from Quil. OH.

And I couldn't even make fun of him for it-- I envied him too much.

REALLY!? I mean, WEELY!? Jacob and Quil have a conversation, and Quil's attention is divided because Claire is asking him for a rock on the ground. To bash him in the head and kill him. Good instinct again, Claire! Jacob asks Quil why he doesn't date some girls in the meantime, Quil asks Jacob why he doesn't date girls. They express more or less the same sentiment that they don't see other girls anymore, they don't "see their faces." But don't you guys at least see their tits and their asses and stuff?

We're supposed to take a minute and sigh with these two heartsick dudes, I guess. Is that what we're supposed to do? If you were reading this book and barely paying attention, like, if you had something in your eye and you were blinking a lot, I feel like you would read it the way S. Meyer intended. Otherwise it's pretty hard not to see it as evil, basically. Because Quil is not a cute abused nanny, he's a near adult male who is waiting for a toddler to get old enough that he can stick his dick in her without going to jail. And Jacob is gradually channeling his sexual frustration into murderous rage.

And then to top it all off, there's a nice homophobic back and forth. When Quil says he doesn't see girls anymore, Jacob alludes to Quil's earlier confession that he wore a tiara at Claire's third birthday party (an image so dark and wrought with psychosexual despair I don't even want to think about it) and says Claire might have a different kind of competition to worry about.

Quil laughed and made kissing noises at me. "You available this Friday, Jacob?"

No homo! Hahahahahaha I hate these people.