9-17-2008 A Wild Sheep Chase

I was at the Jonny Lang concert last night and he sang about running a red light and drinking too much while speeding through your whole life. It eerily reminded me of this book as it kind of speeds to somewhere that I have been been unable to figure out yet. We talked about realism, modernism and started to get into post-modernism. This novel is an amalgamation of elements of all of those forms. There is a real search for a sheep. There is the internal conflict of what is driving Boku which I don't even think he is consciously aware of, but we are left to puzzle out. And then there is the great post-modern question, of can we ever truly know anything anyway? Is there any deeper meaning besides the words on the page? This novel meshes well with Haroun in that it takes on the "sea of stories" and rewrites the myths that form the basis of most cultural identity. He does it in a very deliberate way which I think is an intentional way of bringing the reader's awareness to the historical and social influences of Japanese culture (and American pop culture) on the novel and story-telling in general.