Rick Bass, "The Watch" Stories

Analysis By: Hannah Davis

Mexico ………………………………………………………………………. D

Choteau ……………………………………………………………………... C -

The Watch ………………………………………………………………….. B

Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses ……………………………… A+

Juggernaut …………………………………………………………………. F

Mississippi ………………………………………………………………….. C

In Ruth’s Country …………………………………………………………… A+

Wild Horses ………………………………………………………………… B

The Government Bears ……………………………………………………. B

Redfish ……………………………………………………………………… C

In Ruth’s Country (A+)

This story talks about a forbidden love between two high school students, a cattle rancher and a Mormon girl named Ruth. This story was probably my favorite in the book and for me to like a love story, let alone give it an “A” is actually quite the feat. As with all of the stories in this book, Bass uses a stream of consciousness style of writing to give the reader a false sense of security that everything is going to be okay between the characters. For this story, the stream of consciousness is told from the perspective of the male love interest. The narrator’s thoughts always start off thinking about Ruth and then stray into relating it to a memory about his cattle, or the hawk flying above his head, or the way the sky turns purple at night. This stream of consciousness style allows Bass to jump over long periods of time and skip over character’s working through their issues, which leaves them to all pile up until the end of the story. This is shown when Ruth tells the narrator, her high school love interest, that her boss had touched her once. You would expect a story that drops a bomb like that in the middle of the conversation to dive into the “Who, what, when, where, why,” but the narrator does not even stop to consider it, he simply goes into the next paragraph which describes his jeep and the hawk flying above them like it was nothing. However, this also makes the reader wonder on how much time has passed between those sentences, because despite there being no indication of the time it is written like a lot of time had passed between the thoughts.

This style shows how time is continuous and constant in a story but doesn’t get bogged down in making sure that the reader knows how long it's been or what time it is because it is not necessary to the story, it only matters that time has passed. This style helps to keep the story focused on the character’s reaction to the time passing and not about the time itself being the issue. In this way, Bass is limiting and only gives the reader what they need. For instance, I did not even realize until writing this that the narrator did not have a name.

Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses (A+)

Another trait of Bass’ writing in this book is the use of telling the main action through the eyes of a relatively uninvolved character. A popular book which also does this is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which tells the story of the illustrious Jay Gatsby, but through the eyes of Nick Carraway who doesn’t appear to have a lot of involvement in the story besides being Gatsby’s friend. Bass does this same kind of narration especially well in “Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses,” which tells the story of a group of professors who are all trying to live up to their dreams of making it big and escaping the south, but with a focus on the potential of the narrator’s friend Robby, who is young and full of potential for making it big as a writer but is always lost in writing good sentences and not in writing a whole story.

If this story was told through the perspective of Robby the reader would have found such a character probably extremely narcissistic and annoying, for not feeling good enough to write whole stories, but since it is told from the perspective of a friend the reader can sympathize with Robby since the friend does.

This style really helps to show the depth of a character while providing only a few concrete detail about the character themselves. This is because this type of narration is just like hearing a story from another person, with both the reader and the narrator experiencing the same story at the same time. This gives the reader a commonality with the narrator, in that they are both unsure of the whole story but want to know more, and it brings the reader deeper into the narrative. This type of narration also adds mystery to the story since the person telling the story is an unreliable narrator who doesn’t even know the entire details of the story themselves.

The Juggernaut (F)

As previously mentioned, Rick Bass likes to use a lot of “stream of consciousness” in his stories. However, in this story, the stream of consciousness does not work out and neither does telling the story from an “outsider” narrator. This is because the thoughts that this narrator has are so fragmented and unrelated that they give away the ending of the story within the first page or two. In this story, the narrator is talking about his old geometry teacher Mr. Odom and the weird stories he likes to tell and it jumps in between sitting in his geometry class with his friend and going to watch an underground hockey team called The Juggernauts, also with his friend Kirby. These two situations are so far apart from each other and in the beginning the story it is trying to tell the reader is that their only commonality was that this is what the narrator and his friend Kirby did together in high school.

However, in the end (spoilers) it is revealed that their geometry teacher is actually a player on The Juggernauts hockey team under the pseudonym “Larry Loop” and that he is also in a relationship with another student in the geometry class, a hot cheerleader named Laura. However, if you have read the story you realize this way before it is confirmed because the narrator goes into far too much detail describing the antics of both Mr. Odem and Larry Loop and makes it obvious hints that they are the same person and also drops hints about the way that he is constantly staring at Laura when she is cheering at football games.

In the case of telling a juicy story from an outside source, which Bass is also fond of doing, the narrator is far too distant from the actions of Laura and the teacher since he never actually directly interacts with either of them, unlike in other stories with an “outsider” narrator. That being said, the story would have been much better told from the perspective of Laura or if the narrator and Laura were actually best friends and not Kirby.

Author’s Website 

Author Interview

Buy the Author’s Books