SOURCE: “‘I Send You a Picture’: Ondaatje's Portrait of Billy the Kid,” in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1983, pp. 117-39.

In the essay below, Owens presents a thorough analysis of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, focusing in particular on the tension between order and disorder in the collection. Owens asserts that Billy “seeks or imposes order in the external world to compensate for a disintegrating inner world.”

I

The reader finds in Ondaatje's Billy a strong desire for order, a rage for order, one might say, if Billy's style and voice were not so deliberately flat in so many places. From his opening words, Billy reveals an inclination to order his world as he neatly lists “the killed” by himself and “by them.”¹ The precision and meticulousness of Billy's list stand in contrast to the qualities of those photographs enumerated by Billy's contemporary, L. A...