Word: jakes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...what truly involves the reader with Jake is O'Nan's arresting use of second person. "You like it like this, the bright languid days," the narrator instructs immediately. The reader watches Friendship through Jake's eyes; he smells death through Jake's nose. He contemplates hell through Jake's fears...
...Jake must decide how to comfort and save his people, both physically and spiritually, as he listens to the town bell toll death by the hour...
...recognized the abruptness of his style but felt the overall intensity and involvement was worth confusing his reader for the first 30 pages. The reader's discomfort and anxiety concerning the epidemic are profoundly enhanced by the voice, by his lack of freedom of thought. His thoughts are Jake's, so just as Jake is helpless against the disease and unable to rescue his loved ones, so too is the reader unable to help Jake and, instead, grows in insanity with...
...book has an estranging, weird effect. Jake is so responsible he's driven to madness. At the same time, this madness is his own salvation and the salvation of the world...
...Jake is torn. It's a fight between withdrawal into the self, which is sterile and useless, and being the center of the community. I don't know how he resolves it. In the end, he believes in some way. He's not quite sure, but he knows he can't force grace to work...