Point of View

Given the chaotic 1960s when these three works by Brautigan were published, both the prose and poetry attempt to make some sense of mercurial reality by concentrating on the miniature and the tangible. In all three works, the point of view is that of both participant and observer. Brautigan uses the narrative "I" as the focal point or center, from which his writings emanate. Sometimes this reality is as rock solid as comparisons of fishing lures and at other times, reality is hallucinatory but not necessarily metaphorical, as in the case of wise old trout, gigantic statues of vegetables, or a factory to extract various types of sugar from watermelons. In the case of these hallucinatory passages, the narrator seems to shift along with his reality. It remains an open question whether Brautigan chose this style of writing to try to convey the experience of taking...