The Endless Walk Of Richard Brautigan

The story is told through a series of imaginative journal entries, some finished, some skipped over in lost time. The author uses a variety of literary techniques to keep the pace of the story clean and flowing with an even logical tempo. Flashbacks are used from an earlier viewing before he jumps back, typical Brautigan, into a journal entry. Often, the present moment will jump into this period of recollection, invading the past with a current thought or idea. Brautigan uses the art of minimalism to perfection, as he strips useless words from context, tells the story in with a straightforward style mixed with his own unique style of humor, and simplifies the strength of the English language, so that he deals with complex themes in a style that is simple and void of danling adjectives, clauses, or verb syntax. He throws in surprises throughout his prose, adding changes that speed or slow down the flow of the plotline. He tells stories within stories, switches to past and then draws the future into the ever-present present. He changes the order of the sequence in events, so that the novel presents itself as a neatly tied package for his reader to enjoy.

The introductory preface begins with a short and simple letter describing the tragic death of his close friend by suicide. In those moving and emotional declaration of his love for her friendship, he shows us a feeling of that emotional loss that every human experiences at some point in his or her life with the sort of antipathy that moves the reader with the heart, seeking the emotional reandering of loss through the feeling of the moment. The letter R may be a reference to the author himself. At this point, the preface as the rest of the book, becomes confusing. When Brautigan uses the first person narrative, is he refering to his own thoughts and actions or is he refering to a character that exists in fiction, whom he has created. Like Hunter S. Thompson or Jack Kerouac, it is often difficult to determine when the first person speaks for the thoughts of Richard Brautigan himself, and when these thoughts refer to a fictional character of the imaginary literary mind.

Where is the real Richard Brautigan and when does fiction surface and take over the subconscous prose of self-biography. This is a question that seems to rise over and over again in the writings of Brautigan, especially the prose more so than the poetry, making it almost impossible to determine when the author

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