reading response week 3

The story of Alain and his constant tragedy draws a reader to express many forms of depression to perhaps force the reader to empathize with the author. This paired with the style of writing the author possesses causes a flashing slideshow of images. There are many literary devices that the author utilizes that portray the amount of sadness and despair that Alain undergoes. In the story, Will O’ The Wisp by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, the sheer grittiness of the events creates a realistic piece of literature to read, compared to that of other stories which are overly emphasized; removing the possibility of a realistic scenario. This realism appears to be a revelation had by the author: the world is not nice, it does not give, it simply takes until everything you have is gone. Observing the loss of his friend and colleague, Jacques Rigaut, one can only assume that it was this loss that lead to Rochelle’s breakthrough in writing and impacted every word and punctuation of his work. Rochelle incorporated his losses into his writing.
Alain’s misfortunes starts with a “grungy” feel ending with ironic twists. One example in this book was that “6 months earlier, Lydia was a divorcee and became engaged to Alain in a bathroom in NY one evening. But three days later she married a stranger but separated shortly afterwards and is getting her divorce paperwork done soon.” Clearly there are no happy endings in this story and none seem to be happening anytime soon to anyone else. Alain himself was going through a divorce. The entire story is a series of losses with more losses expected. The way Rochelle captures the images of Alain and Lydia in the early scenes are not like the average “painted picture” that most authors strive for, but rather like snapshots of a rainy afternoon in an alleyway in New York. Although the author said that these two characters were beautiful he described them in sort of an ugly way. The staccato-like sentences that Rochelle uses creates an effect of short flashes that come together to make a collage of an even bigger, grittier, picture. These flashes, paired with the short firing of conversation that go back and forth in monosyllabic responses, literally gives the feel of a city backdrop with death lingering in the air. The concept of tying in the emotions felt by Rochelle over the loss Rigaut is obvious in his writing:
It was the eternal room in which he lived. He had been without a home for years but he had his place in this ideal prison which closed round him every evening wherever he was. Closed in isolated, in the last stages of his retreat, he stopped at some objects. In the absence of people who melted away as soon as he left them, these objects gave him the illusion of touching something outside himself. Because of this he became immediately dependent upon the absurd objects which his whims selected. Philosophy, art, politics or morals, he found every system impossibly pretentious. So, for want of being held together by ideas, the world was so inconsistent that it offered him no means of support. Only solid things kept their form for him. In this he was deceiving himself.

Such emotion in a character; that one could feel as he had felt, breathed, lived until Rigaut’s ultimate decision. Although it seems almost didactic, one would still need to know the history and the connection that Rochelle had with his dear friend to truly understand the true meaning behind this paragraph and how Rochelle perceived the moments before suicide must have felt for Rigaut.
Throughout this story, any reader can notice how Alain planned this death from the very beginning, when he noticed his youthful looks were fading away at the age of thirty. His charmingly, fresh appearance might have lasted longer if it were not for the drugs. Alain constantly would set himself for failures throughout his life. With Dorothy, the author shows how much she had meant to Alain, which was much more than Lydia, but Alain still cheated on Dorothy and would even go back to drugs. Alain never truly tried to make his life for the better. All he cared about was these three things; money, women, and drugs. But even when he had the better two of the three, money and a wife (Dorothy), Alain was never content. He felt that he was a bad lover, which led him to drugs and became poor. Alain messed up his life by losing the best thing he could have ever gotten in his life; Dorothy. He never even tried hard enough to open his antiques store. He never even tried to make better of his life. Death was easier for him.
In the ending, like most stories, closure is found but to avoid the common translations found for the story. With the thought of Rochelle’s loss, the ending is more of a closure for him rather than the story’s.