Andrew's Brain II

More on the novel, Andrew's Brain, by Doctorow. 

We discover soon after the passage I quoted yesterday that the narrative voice saying "I can tell you about my friend, Andrew" is himself Andrew.  He has a proclivity for speaking of himself, and I submit a proclivity for seeing himself, in the third person.

This discovery has weight in the unfolding of the not-especially-narrative tale. For one of the key themes here is the relation of mind to brain, of a self to its physical stratum.  And one might say that to the extent we reduce self to brain, we are trying to escape from the responsibilities of a first person point of view, into a world in which there is no subject, there is only the third person. 

The first chapter is the longest in the book, going 50 pages. That is one-quarter the length of the book though there are eleven chapters. That is not remarkable -- the long first chapter feels like leisurely scene setting. 

Anyway: as the second chapter opens we have received no answer yet to the question: how did Briony die? It appears possible that she died in childbirth. That, if true, would give some extra poignancy to that first scene, in which Andrew presses his infant child upon his ex-wife. 

Early in the second chapter, we get an odd sort of call-back to that scene.  Andrew, again talking about himself in the third person, says "As a boy one winter afternoon Andrew appeared at the door of his little girlfriend to return the doll he'd stolen from her. His mother had insisted that he do this, knock on the door and not give any excuse ... just to say he'd taken the doll when she wasn't looking and he was sorry and would never do anything like that again.Andrew did as he was told." 

[The above photo is of a perfectly random doll with no connection to this novel.]

In that little story the use of the third-person voice fulfills a complicated role.  Mother apparently wanted her boy to learn something about taking responsibility for one's actions.  Andrew talks about what Andrew did as a matter of doing as he was told, by way of escaping responsibility for having participated in a responsibility-accepting ritual.

 But by this time we have gotten somewhat to know the therapist to whom Andrew is doing a lot of talking ... about Andrew.  He -- the patient -- tells that story about the stolen doll and a couple of other stories from the same era in his life, when he was seven years old or so in Montcalm, New Jersey, or when he was just eight in New York City.  Then he says, self-reflexively, "There you have it.  Early Andrew.  I'm presuming you like childhoods." 

Responds the therapist, "Well, they can be instructive."  

Indeed they can.  All of his childhood stories portray Andrew as both desirous of and evasive with regard to responsibility for his own actions and their consequences.