Who wants to live forever?

So we spent all of Thursday in class talking about Jefferson’s diary, and I don’t know about second hour, but in seventh about half the class was at least sniffling by the end of class. Nevertheless, we had a really good discussion about the chapter. We touched on questions like “Has Jefferson succeeded?” “What will Jefferson’s legacy be?” “What has Jefferson learned and what do we think about his inevitable death?” But through all of this discussion, the undercurrent was

“What makes this chapter sad?”

Shall we count the ways?

At every level of construction, this chapter is full of aching beauty. Let’s go from the smallest building blocks up.

At the word and sentence level, the chapter is a complete and obvious break from the rest of the book. Since Jefferson hasn’t learned to read and write as well as the other narrator, Grant, his journal doesn’t use correct spelling or grammar. Instead, it lacks most punctuation and spells phonetically and in vernacular.

These stylistic changes accomplish two things. First, they force the reader to slow down and to hear the words in their head instead of skimming through. Since sentences are not well-delineated, you have to read every word to figure out where one thought ends and the next begins. And the phonetic spelling makes people listen to the way the words sound, which creates an effect similar to, in movies, when the writer of a letter reads it out loud. The unfamiliar use of English messes with our mental “reading voice” and really makes it sound like someone else wrote what we are reading.

Second, the sentence-level structure of the journal lends a candid, stream-of-consciousness attitude to the book. I was talking about this in class: Nobody’s inner monologue speaks in perfectly grammatical English. We’re all thinking in weird long run-on sentences, full of questionable associations and overused words. When we write, we change the natural pattern of our though to make it fit the grammar of English. But Jefferson is ignorant of this grammar and so his writing doesn’t fit it – isn’t constrained by it. Even though Jefferson is probably spending quite a bit of time figuring out how to spell words so they’re readable, when you read his writing, it sounds like he’s just writing whatever comes to mind. It’s like his thoughts are printed directly onto the page. It creates a raw emotion that you don’t get in the carefully controlled grammar of Grant’s narration.

At the level of paragraphs, we notice that they appear to each be separate entries. As time goes on, the time between the entries grows shorter. One moment that’s really, really sad to me is the simple declaration “its munday an i aint got but just a few days left” because it offers a sudden anchor in time. Before that, the narration had been floating in my mind as maybe a couple weeks out? But the new information – Jefferson only has five days left – infuses everything after this statement with new sadness.

And then right after that, we get the question about “is that love?” which puts another big theme of the novel into perspective. The big, major, large-scale impact of this chapter is to reveal how truly human Jefferson has become. The real sadness here is not just the loss of Jefferson’s human life, but the loss of all that he’s learned. Instead of being able to take his new knowledge (his realization that he matters and that he loves people and people love him and he belongs) home with him and live out his life, he has to die immediately after these revelations. And he’s the only person to whom Grant has taught about humanity, respect, and love. He’s the one who could take this knowledge back to the community, but he cannot teach it himself because he’s sentenced to death. And he’s completely aware of this problem, this responsibility that he can’t fulfill, not only because he knows the date of his death, but also because Grant’s goal was to teach him that people valued him and that he mattered – right before his death.

And, at the same time as he grapples with questions about if he can break the cycle given only weeks of time and square feet of space, he also has to face the imminent loss of his world. To me, the most sad and beautiful parts of the diary are at the very end, when Jefferson seems to measure out quantities of life that are left to him: one more tree with leaves on it. One more sunset. One more sunrise. One more blue sky. And one more cup of ice cream with a moon pie.