Reading Journal

Evan Ratliff’s Vanish is an exemplary example of a first person narrative. In class there has been a lot of discussion about first person narrative and when it works (and why) and when it doesn’t. The way Vanish is broken up into sections going back and forth between Ratliff’s perspective and 3^rd person narrative was an effective way to create tension for this literal game of cat-and-mouse.

Ratliff’s documentation of the emotional experience of being transformed into an entirely new (fake) person, I thought was especially fascinating. I think he really taps into his own inherent human nature by describing the emotions that elicit from his experience. Like arriving into New Orleans—“Showing up in a city with no friends, no contacts, no credit cards, and no ID is itself a discomfiting experience…”—It’s almost like there are two stories here. One in which Ratliff is involved in a contest, and the other where he is slowly being transformed by this enlightening, unnerving, lonely experience. His reaction of being angry first when caught was particularly evocative—although he was in complete isolation and lonely—he had invested so much. It was almost heartbreaking to see him get caught. Very fascinating, for it all to be over with a simple line like, “You wouldn’t happen to know a guy named Fluke, would you?”

I thought the concept of the article was really interesting, and by including the intricate web of all the players involved it succeeded in giving the piece a cinematic feeling. I especially thought the relationships that developed allowed the piece to take on a life of its own. Makela and Ratliff’s exchange in the private chat room after he’s been caught brings the relationship between “pursuer” and “pursuee” full circle.

Also, it did a good job in deconstructing the methods involved to track down Ratliff—like the significance of the I.P addresses, and the software used to interpret them (as well as Ratliff’s own painstaking effort to confound his pursuers).

Jeanne Marie Laskas’ This Is Your Brain on Football is also another exemplary example of this. When discussing hard science it is easy to get lost in clinical descriptions, and although that can’t be escaped entirely—“It appeared utterly normal. Regular folds of gray matter. No mush. No obvious contusions…No shrinkage…”—Laskas eases readers into the scientific process by including clever comparisons:

“He thought of it sort of like Miss America. Such a diva! So high-maintenance: it requires more energy to operate than any other organ. The brain!”

The strength of this piece lies in the way Laskas ties the analytical with the emotional. By opening with the case of Mike Webster—the first to be diagnosed with CTE posthumously—Laskas is able to structure the piece around Webster, and is able to include mini-stories of others linked to him like Fitzsimmons who would become more relevant to the case (becoming Omalu’s lawyer), as well as the stories of those that would be diagnosed after him.

One thing I noticed in The Orchid Children is that I would often find myself rereading the same paragraph. When compared to other scientific based articles like This is Your Brain on Football, the metaphors used to help better understand the psychological processes often falls flat—“They don’t see the upside, because they don’t look for it. It’s like dropping a dollar bill, and you grab it. But you completely miss the five that’s just beyond your feet."