The Flame Alphabet

"Today our leaving was blessed by a sheer wall of privacy.  The body language on our street could have been studied for its gesture-perfect evasions.  Just before, Rabbi Burke, speaking by cable to our Jewish hut, called it defended semaphore, the gestures of a body craving disappearance.  How many ways can you say Stay the fuck away from me without speaking?  It was a well-crafted public solitude.  We were all artfully alone out there, a condition we had better get used to." (5)

This passage was a chilling one for me to read.  Marcus' tendency to describe people as unfriendly, solitary, individualistic, and cold in this novel is a very negative way to view society.  What stood out to me about this passage was that the body language and the scenery itself was even hostile, not just biting words.  The morbid, dark imagery expressed in this passage illustrates a gloomy, chilly, antagonistic environment.  It sets the scene for the duration of the novel, an incredibly grim tale in and of itself.  When one imagines a street, the connotation that arises is one where people are moving around, constantly conversing with one another.  However, this environment's tendency to force everyone to feel isolated suggests a different kind of society.  Describing it as "a well-crafted public solitude" insinuates that this is the socially accepted way of living, and that the public is aware of an preserves this sort of lifestyle.  This passage also emphasizes the importance of collaboration, friendship, and companionship with those around us.  The narrator clearly does not like this solitary existence, and yearns human contact and intimacy.

The Flame Alphabet - 11/17/2014

"Pain is too soft a word for the reaction. Crushing was more accurate, an intolerable squeezing in the chest and the hips, though I didn't have measurements to support the claim. The Marshall Symptom appliance, bolted to the sidewalk outside the medical center on Fifth Street and visited by a procession of gray-faced neighbors, was meant to detect just how slushed our insides were from too much speech, how blighted we'd become from the language toxin."

This passage stuck out to me because it describes the powerful effect that children's speech has on people. However, what I liked the most about it was how Sam emphasized the effect it had on the way society acted as a whole. The complexion's of people on the street had changed and the fact that body language becomes a much more powerful way of communication were all interesting parts about this scene and the book in general that I think should be pointed out. Another aspect of the story that I found intriguing was the idea that Sam and Claire had to weigh their own well-being versus their love for their daughter Esther. This scene starts to describe to the reader how different life is with this "disease" of sorts. I think the theme that this scene demonstrates is definitely relevant today, but is manifested on a different level. For example, I think this plays a role when it comes to financial decisions that families have to make. Sometimes parents make tremendous sacrifices so that their children can have a certain lifestyle that originally wouldn't be possible without financial cutbacks in another area.

The Flame Alphabet

"I smiled her way, a little too wide, because the display concerned me. I produced superlatives and praise, in chivalrous phrases that sounded like a foreign language, but I couldn’t get the tone right. I couldn’t scrub my voice of worry. If she returned my look she did so defiantly, daring me to say what I was really thinking. But I had already stopped doing that." (17)


I found this passage very interesting in that it parallels the motif of the negatives of language that flow throughout the first half of the book. I was particularly interested in how an adult was able to forget how to interact with his wife, someone who is as important to a husband as anyone. This grabbed my attention since the adults were so opposed to language in the first place, as the language used by children spread disease. But, the fact that someone couldn't even say nice words about the person he cares most about really shocked me. It made me begin to think of the impact that some children have on families today where they can lead to disagreements between the two parents and whether that was the motivation to use the children's language as the spread of disease. I became interested in whether this lack of communication between adults could be a metaphor for divorce and whether the fault was at the child's hands, where a child put infinite stress on the parents that they would come to a point where they couldn't even compliment each other, and hadn't been compliment each other for a long time.

The Flame Alphabet

"Had this parents built a locker beneath the stairs, as we did? Cut in a peephole, lined the little room with pillows? Had they shielded themselves from the speech of their offspring, effaced their hearing, or damaged the little ones themselves, stopped the reeking language as its source? Were they pumping white noise from the old slab radio, and did it not fully hide the child's speech? or perhaps the parents had already fled upstate. If they were smart. If they knew how to shut down their attachment apparatus and see they children for what they really, most essentially, were. Agents of such terrible mouth sounds that, relation or not, one hoped never to see them again." (105)

Damn. This passage, and this whole first half of the book is so full of heavy, mind-boggling, incomprehensible passages and narrations like this one. In particular, this passage highlights the sheer desperation bred from this epidemic. It shows to what lengths parents that once, and possibly still do, loved their children are forced to go to in order to have any hope of survival. I could not imagine being in the position these people are faced with in the novel. It is so unfathomable to have to flee your own blood just to survive and continue living. That's what makes this novel so powerful: Marcus digs deep into that which is unimaginable, and does it in a seemingly logical and justified way.