Because The World Was Hollow : Part II

Part II

Scenes shift back and forth between past and present, adding to the total affect of the story. References are continuously made to The Place Of Forgotten Works. In the utopian community of i-death and watermelong sugar, life remains ordered. People work and live their lives in a structured world, where schedule holds permeance with tradition. There is a sense of reckoning as the townspeople discuss the place of forgotten works over the dinner table. Margaret and our transparent narrator are told not to venture there. It is a place of danger, a place to be avoided. There are constant warnings not to visit this place, but neither character is told the reason. Mysterious stories from the past surround this place and i-death, and there are sculptures and structures, whose purpose and meaning has been lost over time. It is a place where the forgotten live and are lost; a dangerous place where things are buried never to be discovered. This is the danger of in-boil and his gang. They break the rules, throw tradition away, refusing to conform, while forever running into the night mists of the mind.

Settlers living in this village will occasionally, cautiously travel there, into this land of the forgotten. They will then leave, telling their fellow neighbors of the hidden sights boardering along the dangerous realms of the expressionistic. When in-boil and his gang enter the land of forgotten works, the characters enter a world of fable and myth. They are wild and unruly, known for their heavy drinking, and are expelled from the community. They are forced to leave.

They soon take up residence in the land of the forgotten works, and the story once again begins to flow, as events seem to move towards an uncertain center. In-boil and his gang represent order gone astray, the basic animalistic needs of man let loose upon the world. They stand for the destroyer of civilization; chaos running rampent, the hand of time turning in the force of the wind; and as Odysseus in some ship's bow searching to find home again, these heroes remain lost in the abyss of the self, mourning for the dawn, drowning in the waters of an everlasting dawn. They enter some netherworld, reaching towards some undefined moment. It is this undefined moment that these characters represent; but the reader cannot help but think that there may be something more to Brautigan's development of in-boil and his band of merry men, and he is correct.

"Like most artists, Richard Brautigan had his obsessions. Death was one. Plumbing was another.

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