This week, I was most interested in the breaks and structure of the essays and how they framed a story with distinct, yet interrelated pieces. Both essays, The Search for Marvin Gardens and The Empathy Essay, were divided into sections jumping between different narratives. The narratives ran parallel to each other and in doing so created a larger narrative informed by both pieces.
In “The Search for Marvin Gardens” McPhee describes competing in a Monopoly championship series, while sharing history and facts about the creation of the boardgame. He also switches to another narrative that reports details about his travels around Atlantic City and the history of its development. Each break changes setting and forces the reader to quickly become accustomed to the new scenery, but the images, tone, and feelings of the previous narrative spill over into the next, and the reader begins to compare and tie strands between the two worlds.
McPhee starts “Through the air, I move my token…to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range” and in the very next section he is in Atlantic City watching dogs move through the crumbling streets. Then, St. Charles Place is described during the Monopoly game and in the next section we are actually standing on the rundown sidewalk outside St. Charles Place. One place moves into another, one image of the game is reflected in the real city that inspired Monopoly. The “Go to Jail Card” leads into the cellblocks of a local jail; the hope to land Marvin Gardens in the game transforms into the search for Marvin Gardens in Atlantic City.
The narrator gives observations about the game and observations about the city. By doing this side by side, one informs the other. Of course, we learn about the creation of the game as a play at developing Atlantic City on a board, but looking at the imaginary world of a game juxtaposed to the reality of a crumbling city creates gravity in the narrative. The economic issues become highlighted next to the thrill of the “entrepreneurial” players swiping up property and railroads. The imaginary game makes the reality more poignant.
A similar structure works in “The Empathy Essay” as Jamison gives different case summaries and training materials about imaginary patients that she has to pretend to be. However, at one point she places her real self in the case studies and through this format describes her personal experience as a patient. In this essay, the two narratives bleed into each other, but the construct of a fake patient’s emotional state and interactions with a pretending doctor informs the interactions Jamison actually has with her doctors. The idea of feigning emotion, hiding emotion, and feeling melodramatic plays out in both the imaginary patient-doctor relationships and in Jamison’s real life with both doctors and her boyfriend.
The imaginary roles reveal the complexity of dealing with emotion and the ways that Jamison wants to act in these imaginary roles or her unspoken or crossed out thoughts during these scenarios gives us more information about how she sorts through her own feelings. The pretend scenarios and the actual interactions between Jamison and her doctors seem to be both “actual and constructed at once.” The idea of pretending confuses even Jamison and has her second guessing if she is faking empathy or embellishing emotions. Both essays weave two pieces together and juxtapose an unreal situation with observations about a real world situation, and it seems the framing of the two together highlights details.
