… It is a directed silence, more than a pause, an implication, a
prompting … I want you to know that something has been left out, but I
am not going to tell you what that thing is … No literary text I’m
aware of uses the ellipsis more than Pär Lagerkvist’s Barabbas, which
won the author the Nobel in 1951 … I tell my students that I imagine a
sea monster on the page … the visible words his surfacing … the
ellipses the places where he submerges, heads for the deep … In the
biblical narrative, as well as Lagerkvist’s novella, Barabbas is the
prisoner released in place of Christ, omitted from the tableau of the
Crucifixion … I think of the “Yada Yada Yada” Seinfeld episode, where
the characters omit crucial parts of stories with that phrase … One
student suggests that the ellipsis is always a passive aggressive
attempt to get the reader to pry into the omission … “All right,
enough!” George exclaims. “No more yada yadas. Just give me the full
story” … My father, who is very sick, laughs hysterically without
cause, and when we ask him what he’s laughing at, he can’t speak well
enough anymore to say … The book is full of narrative ellipses, too,
not just the dots on the page … voyages to the underworld described
simply as “nothing” … confessions of faith no one can understand … the
particulars of decades in Barabbas’s life … He sits in his chair, his
head lolled slightly to one side, his proper square teeth exposed as
his body softly shakes, and he whispers, “I’ll tell you later” … My
students hate the book for its baldness, for the blank simplicity of
the characters’ sentiments, their clichés and idioms … I want you to
know … “This book is about him” … Something has been left out …
This made me miss your teaching! I see so many things in this and that’s exactly the point. I see the use of ellipsis so often, whether it be in txt messages or Facebook or status updates on social media. I sometimes get the feeling that we are leaving more out than we are putting in, but why do we do that? I feel like it’s a flare for the secretive, a touch of mystery, an attempt at making a situation more appealing to the viewer, because maybe in the eyes of the teller, it’s rather bland, and a lot of us spend a great deal of time trying to make ourselves more interesting, but you can’t lump one in with the other and generalize, because we all do this in different ways. Looking at things for face value can often times be boring. Ellipsis sparks imagination.
Thanks, Christel! My novella classes at ‘Bama were, for me, some of the most thought-provoking that I taught there …
I see what you did there… well played…
I hope things are going well for you!