He Learned About Life At Sixteen

Though I find Brautigan’s work to be too abstract for anything more than general analysis, his poetry is some of the most original and refreshing work I have read in years. His ability to tell a story, no matter how emblematic and metaphorical, never ceases to entertain me. The storyline in the work “Sea, Sea Rider” takes place in less than an hour, but every detail adds to both the book keeper’s eccentric perspective of the events and the boy’s more realistic viewpoint.

The bizzare, almost psychedelic inspired words of Brautigan give the characters a very distinct, vivid personality. By using only a sentence or two, he quickly and clearly paints a vivid image of each character portrayed in this piece. In the opening scene, Brautigan depicts the bookstore owner with the epic passage,

“He was, of course, a Jew, a retired merchant seaman who had been torpedoed in the North Atlantic and floated there day after day until death did not want him. He had a young wife, a heart attack, a Volkswagen and a home in Marin County. He liked the works of George Orwell, Richard Aldington and Edmund Wilson…He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans” (22).

Immediately the reader is able to imagine a man shaped in his youth by fantasy and experience, and as he aged, gradually learned from the hardships of life and his near escapes from death. The owner of a bookstore, he obviously appreciates the quieter side of life, and by reading the adventures of others, lives vicariously first through the novels and then through narrator of the tale.

Brautigan introduces a new character after establishing the role of the narrator and bookkeeper. Stating that “the girl was very pretty and her body was like a clear mountain river of skin and muscle flowing over rocks of bone and hidden nerves,” Brautigan presents the girl by emphasizing her only function in this work: sexual fulfillment (23).

In the rest of the work, Brautigan delves into the mind of the bookkeeper to relay a fantastical plot that takes place between the narrator and his lovers. Through this eccentric description of the brief sexual affair, Brautigan teaches the reader that (though the actual events may not be so abstract and unrealistic) an entire lifetime of emotions and unvoiced expressions can exist in just a few fleeting moments with a stranger.