Michael Knight: Goodnight, Nobody

Michael Knight: Goodnight, Nobody

Contents

Birdland -- C

Feeling Lucky -- D

Killing Stonewall Jackson -- F

The End of Everything -- A+

The Mesmerist -- D+

Keeper of Secrets, Teller of Lies -- C

Mitchell’s Girls -- B-

Ellen’s Book -- C

Blackout -- B

The End of Everything

Michael Knight proves himself worthy to be published with our name. In the course of “The End of Everything”, Knight does not allow the reader to intrude into the character’s exact point of view at all. While, we, as readers, do get a glimpse of memories or desires that the main character, whose identity was never revealed, her exact thoughts were never exposed. The true beauty of “The End of Everything”, I believe lies in the yearning of the characters. Both Jimmy and the dental hygienist yearn for love. When Jimmy left the dental hygienist, she was devastated. The dental hygienist needed another lost cause to save, a dog. She becomes fully immersed in the role of a dog owner. Any little emergency needed the immediate attention of a doctor. Jimmy, her ex-husband, search for love or lust continued even during their marriage. The narrator recounts her life during their marriage. The long nights in which she would wait for Jimmy to come around, only for him to never show up. The nights when he did come home, only to smell like other women. Another feature of the story which I truly appreciated was the plot organization and entrances into the high action. When I first read the story, I almost imagined it similar to a movie. The introduction shot is high in the air while the narrator’s voice erupts from the speakers: “Then there’s the one about the woman who comes home from work and discovers her dog -- sometimes a Doberman, sometimes a Lab -- gasping and gagging and giver her walleyed looks from the phony oriental rug in the foyer. The woman is generally a secretary or a dental hygienist, depending on who is telling the story, but she pitches the dog over her shoulder, like she had been rehearsing for this moment all her life, carries him to the car, and is doing an obstacle course run through the tag end of rush hour on the way to the emergency veterinary clinic. She loves her dog.” By the end of that sentence, Knight has zoomed in into the story enough to give us a clearer image of the mess. The rise to the high action truly was the icing on the cake. It starts with the recounting of how she got her dog in a fatigued tone but as she is finally reaching sleep, she is awakened by the phone call from the doctor. This, only four paragraphs in, is what truly grabbed my attention. As soon as she picks up her phone, she is not received by the usual, happy sounding voice of a doctor, but by yelling. The yelling is urging her to leave the house: “Get out of the house, lady! This is no joke. I already called the police… The dog is fine. I’m telling you we found a human finger in his throat.” At the end of this, we are again met with the narrator. “The story, as it is usually told ends here. The woman is left hanging somewhere between safety and certain death. In this particular version, however, it occurs to her that it has been more than an hour since she found the dog and she wonders, even in the midst of panic, what sort of burglar or rapist or serial killer would lose a finger to a dog and still linger at the scene of his intended crime.” The story continues.

The Mesmerist

The reason for rejection lies within the plot. There seems to be no high action, and there is no yearning from Moody, the main character. As soon as I am introduced to the characters, they are out of my reach and the story is done for. What was done here on behalf of Michael Knight, should be deemed a crime. It followed a simple plot: Moody mesmerized a college student to stay with him, and then mesmerized a private investigator who was searching for said college student. There was hardly any complexity or any true background to become connected to or immersed in the story.

Blackout

Complexity is key in the last short story of Goodnight, Nobody. Maybe it is my lack of observation, but had it not been for the title of the story, I would not have been able to make the connection that there was a blackout. Nonetheless, the main urge or yearning and conflict lies in the subject of babies. Porter and Franny both want kids; it is evident that they have been trying long and hard. To begin, Porter had had a talk with the doctor who suggested he take a leave from cigarettes to help with sperm count but Porter had not quit. In fact, he thinks that “a child ought to be born of something more spontaneous and grand.” There is a certain beauty to having all this commotion going on while everything is dark. Rhonda, Franny’s friend and the couple’s neighbor, had faked an affair as an excuse to move back to Texas. Before the blackout, Rhonda’s husband, Wyatt, was going to search for evidence. The blackout was not going to stop him, he decided to look for his night goggles. Meanwhile, Franny is afraid something has happened to the eighty-something year old woman living nearby and sends her husband, Porter, to check up on her. It’s almost as if in the dark, everything has come to light.
The organization of the story is similar to “Birdland”, one paragraph follows a certain topic and the topic interchange. For example, in “Birdland”, one paragraph would be about Elbow, Alabama or Raymond’s early life while the next would be about The Blond and her relationship with Raymond. Here, one paragraph is told from Franny’s point of view, as a comic or simply a literary relief, while the other is told from Porter’s perspective following the high action.