Response to Onjaatje

Ondaatje’s mix of poems, prose-poems and prose creates a vivid sense of what is happening in the story. It is ordered in a mainly chronological way, showing the progression of Billy the Kid and Garrett’s story, moving from friendship to an adversarial relationship. The poems capture the humanity and emotion of the characters with some storytelling elements while the prose sections provide a more traditional, clear sense of what is happening. The two forms complement each other, blending at places where poetry is a continuation of the story in prose and also where the richness of the language in prose feels like poetry. In blocks of prose like page 17, although visually resembling standard fiction the use of repetition and metaphor continue the poetic language of the poems that precede it, “But it was the color and light of the place that made me stay there, not my fever. It became a calm week. It was the color and the light.” It also softens the character Ondaatje is setting up for Billy the Kid, revealing his desire for calm and the simple pleasure of color and light. The repetition of the phrase, for me, created a feeling that was similar to guided meditation – repetition of a simple line, focused on the immediate elements of the surrounding environment. Ondaatje sets up the characters to be the gritty legends of the West while humanizing them, layering the fantastical with the trivial. For example: “He began to dream for the first time in his life. He would wake up in the mornings, his sheets soaked in urine 40% alcohol. He became frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly that he couldnt tell what they planned to do. His mind learned to be superior because of the excessive mistakes of those around him. Flowers watched him” (28). This description of Pat Garrett is lyrical in the sense that it builds him up with poetic excesses (the flowers did not literally watch him.) It is also gritty and raw, describing his sheets soaked in urine, which was nearly half alcohol. The portrayal of death in the poems and prose also adds to the feeling of myth, but also hints at the rather desensitized killer that Bonney was: “believing then the moral of newspapers or gun / where bodies are mindless as paper flowers you dont feed” (11). By putting this at the beginning Ondaatje reminds the reader to keep this aspect of Billy the Kid in mind but then he does not return much to how he imagines Billy thinking about the murders he committed. The pictures and poems in the voice of the people in Bonney’s life add to the feeling of documentary but on the whole this book is more literary than documentary and imaginative rather than factual.