Critique of "Emergency" by Denis Johnson

This short story was well written and used terms and speech common in the 1970’s that gives you a small slice of life during that time.  "Emergency" is aptly named because the protagonist and his friend, Georgie, work in an emergency room and are on a drug trip.   

The voice in this piece was an unreliable narrator where it was from the protagonist’s point of view that went through the events of how he saw and thought of them.  The meaning I took from "Emergency" was how the cycle of life, death, and rebirth affected these individuals and the contrasts of life.   

We start off with Georgie being on drugs and then the narrator taking drugs and then the high and lows of their journey and ending with the narrator questioning who he is.  Through this journey, the seasons change for the narrator emphasizing change and beginnings and endings.  The metaphors used in this story convey the contrasts of life with gritty and ugly versus beautiful imagery and the cycle and miracles of life.

Johnson gives numerous vivid and startling metaphors throughout that are both shocking and appropriate for the protagonist’s freely drug-induced state and the thoughts that the author wishes to convey.  One of my favorite metaphors occurs when “Georgie dropped his mop and bent over in a posture of a child soiling its diapers” (Johnson 14).  Another metaphor that strikes me with its imagery occurs when they “stopped the truck and the boy climbed slowly up out of the fields as out of the mouth of a volcano” (Johnson 20).  The one that made me cringe the most occurs when Georgie hits a jack rabbit with his car and goes out to skin it.  Road kill, Georgie skinning it, and accidentally killing the jack rabbit was not the shocking part to me.  I'm a country girl and I have seen it happen.  It is when he skins it that they found out the jackrabbit had been pregnant and its babies fully formed.  It flashes me back to Georgie mopping up the blood off the floor that only he could see and Terry’s miraculous survival of a knife to the eye.  Terry is a character who shows up early in the story in the narrator's and Georgie's emergency ward.  He was knifed by his wife for spying and ogling another woman.

With all the above being said, this story made me sigh and grimace because it was another druggie story.  I have heard them for most of my life and this story was like most I have heard.  The author either extensively studied people tripping or did LSD himself.  The story is well written and conveys Johnson’s thoughts beautifully, but this story is just not my cup of tea.

Work Cited

Johnson, Denis.  “Emergency.”  Method and Madness: The Making of a Story.  Ed. Alice

LaPlante.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009. 13-21. Print.