Sleeping with the Dead by Kaitlin Fontana: Unfortunately Not Necrophilia Erotica
A Short Reflection By Laura Kelsey
Death is always a traumatic event for anyone, at any stage in life; but trauma also makes for excellent story fodder, and in Sleeping with the Dead, Kaitlin Fontana has taken her father’s publicly discussed fatal accident and examined her own mixed reaction to her family’s loss. But Kaitlin cannot seem to decide whether she is to grieve, or fear, the death of her father, and she comes across as a paranoid wreck throughout most of the story.
This personal narrative tale, set in first person-present tense, gets off to a jumpy start. The author’s uneasiness is conveyed through the sketchy use of short, to the point, sentences when she describes an experience with her doctor. “He doesn’t ask questions, just prescribes pills.” “He knows.” “He doesn’t write it down.” Her paranoia is stated frequently in the first paragraph, beginning with the second sentence. “…I have told him that my father is dead and I can’t sleep at night for fear his ghost will come and try and talk to me.” Again in the paragraph she recognizes her paranoia, now regarding her health, by stating to her doctor that she “seem(s) like a hypochondriac.”
Her paranoia continues as the story, which begins to come across as a set of jumpy snapshots into her jumbled life, changes setting from her doctor’s office to her mother’s home. She states again that she is not sleeping, and that she is frightened easily at some moving bushes in her mother’s back yard. Before, she feared her father’s ghost, but now some of her paranoia is transferred to worries of a “crazy native man” that is sneaking into unlocked homes.
But then the story gets confusing. The next paragraph has her in English class. There is a break in between the paragraphs, so I am expecting a different time or setting, but the new setting is given without any explanation, and this confuses the reader. The author states that she is in a class, but does not mention whether she is a student or teacher. This causes the reader to wonder about her age, and distracts from the story.
The next paragraph sees the story jump again, but backtracks to her mother’s home, and includes a meditation on her father’s publicly broadcasted demise. This passage had me momentarily feeling rising guilt, since I remember reading about the goring of this hunter and laughing over the irony of his passing. But this is the only part of the story that had me feeling anything besides confusion, and it is only a fleeting pang before my bewilderment resumes.
The author again abruptly departs to another setting, but this time we go back in time an unknown number of years to her childhood. She describes a moment when her father brings a bear carcass into her family’s kitchen and guts it, right on the tiles in front of her. It seems obvious that she is not looking for any pity for her dead father after describing his actions with the bear, but I did begin to feel as though she is grasping for sympathy for herself from the reader.
The story then catapults back to the present with no warning. The author is back at the doctor, and then the reader is treated to a pointless paragraph about her sister staying with her in Vancouver. As a reader, I am completely oblivious as to the time frame of the exchange between the siblings. But I do not get a lot of time to think about it, because the story jumps again to a new setting and time.
The story continues like an episode of Quantum Leap throughout its duration, and disrupts any feelings that the author is trying to evoke from the reader. Even if I did want to feel sympathy for the writer and her situation, my compassion gets lost in the confusion of the ever-changing settings and times. But I think the confusion brought out through the story is a reflection of her own uncertainty toward her father’s death. She also succeeds at tarnishing any good image that her father had left by admitting that he had “…cut his knuckle open on (her) mother’s face.” (That line made me want to shake that water buffalo’s hoof.)
A Short Reflection By Laura Kelsey
Death is always a traumatic event for anyone, at any stage in life; but trauma also makes for excellent story fodder, and in Sleeping with the Dead, Kaitlin Fontana has taken her father’s publicly discussed fatal accident and examined her own mixed reaction to her family’s loss. But Kaitlin cannot seem to decide whether she is to grieve, or fear, the death of her father, and she comes across as a paranoid wreck throughout most of the story.
This personal narrative tale, set in first person-present tense, gets off to a jumpy start. The author’s uneasiness is conveyed through the sketchy use of short, to the point, sentences when she describes an experience with her doctor. “He doesn’t ask questions, just prescribes pills.” “He knows.” “He doesn’t write it down.” Her paranoia is stated frequently in the first paragraph, beginning with the second sentence. “…I have told him that my father is dead and I can’t sleep at night for fear his ghost will come and try and talk to me.” Again in the paragraph she recognizes her paranoia, now regarding her health, by stating to her doctor that she “seem(s) like a hypochondriac.”
Her paranoia continues as the story, which begins to come across as a set of jumpy snapshots into her jumbled life, changes setting from her doctor’s office to her mother’s home. She states again that she is not sleeping, and that she is frightened easily at some moving bushes in her mother’s back yard. Before, she feared her father’s ghost, but now some of her paranoia is transferred to worries of a “crazy native man” that is sneaking into unlocked homes.
But then the story gets confusing. The next paragraph has her in English class. There is a break in between the paragraphs, so I am expecting a different time or setting, but the new setting is given without any explanation, and this confuses the reader. The author states that she is in a class, but does not mention whether she is a student or teacher. This causes the reader to wonder about her age, and distracts from the story.
The next paragraph sees the story jump again, but backtracks to her mother’s home, and includes a meditation on her father’s publicly broadcasted demise. This passage had me momentarily feeling rising guilt, since I remember reading about the goring of this hunter and laughing over the irony of his passing. But this is the only part of the story that had me feeling anything besides confusion, and it is only a fleeting pang before my bewilderment resumes.
The author again abruptly departs to another setting, but this time we go back in time an unknown number of years to her childhood. She describes a moment when her father brings a bear carcass into her family’s kitchen and guts it, right on the tiles in front of her. It seems obvious that she is not looking for any pity for her dead father after describing his actions with the bear, but I did begin to feel as though she is grasping for sympathy for herself from the reader.
The story then catapults back to the present with no warning. The author is back at the doctor, and then the reader is treated to a pointless paragraph about her sister staying with her in Vancouver. As a reader, I am completely oblivious as to the time frame of the exchange between the siblings. But I do not get a lot of time to think about it, because the story jumps again to a new setting and time.
The story continues like an episode of Quantum Leap throughout its duration, and disrupts any feelings that the author is trying to evoke from the reader. Even if I did want to feel sympathy for the writer and her situation, my compassion gets lost in the confusion of the ever-changing settings and times. But I think the confusion brought out through the story is a reflection of her own uncertainty toward her father’s death. She also succeeds at tarnishing any good image that her father had left by admitting that he had “…cut his knuckle open on (her) mother’s face.” (That line made me want to shake that water buffalo’s hoof.)
The author obviously had a rocky and distant relationship with her father, but this story did not make me care about it at all. It actually made me feel a slight disdain for the author, as she came across as a spoiled girl who blamed all her problems on her father. Could this story be her post-mortem revenge on him? Well if it is, it is hard to tell, because the tale is too confusing.
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