Thanks to the Beatles's “White Album 1962-1966 [Disc 2]”, I was able to appreciate the “Norwegian Wood” reference. There is certainly a reference to cheap wine and fast women that would mesh well with our discussions of the hard-boiled detective novel. It is a reflective piece of music that I imagine our reflective narrator listening to as he enjoys his “second whiskey” before it loses its taste and (I imagine) he descends into the forgetfulness of the third, fourth and fifth Cutty Sark.
The one thing that really just seemed out of place in this whole story so far is the highly abstract, philosophical debate between the Boss’s second-in-command and our besotted hero. The whole Will vs. Gains debate was quite profound for a guy who insists he is still trying to get inside of boredom and drink his way to his middle years.
I was also extremely impressed with the layers of silence he goes through in Chapter 17. I think this is an important reflection on what is going on. Though there is all this action occurring in the novel, the author is left in silence at least to us as readers. We are stuck to puzzle out whether he is actually clueless as to the significance of the sheep or if he is just playing dumb to see what information he can glean from the Boss’s man.
I absolutely loved the chauffeur being able to recite pi to 32 places effectively destroying the author’s attempt to assert his intelligence.
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It's interesting how we fall into "genre-mode" when we read this text. You're reading this as a detective story and are trying to puzzle out the connections. I tend to read this as an experimental text that combines realism and fantasy.
By the way, the narrator and the author are different!
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