![]() ![]() ![]() Nothing will do but a fresh start, with a fresh set of assumptions In Watermelon Sugar takes us back to the beginning, for this is Eden, with its syllabic and accented soul mate iDEATH, reconstructed. Other utopian dreamers have responded directly to the events of their age, but Brautigan is responding to the cumulative ages of man, and no response can be significant for him that does not place the entire past on the junk heap (the forgotten works). His longings, unlike other utopian ideals, have no claim on progress, no uplifting of the material condition of man, no holy wars to redistribute the physical wealth, no new metaphors for survival based on the securing of human necessities, and no emotional nirvanas. ![]() Three avenues of accessibility, the novel as a utopian instrument, the analogues to the Garden of Eden, and natural determinism converge and create a frame for Brautigan's novel.īrautigan has created the utopian dream for the post-industrial age of affluence, beyond IBM, and finally beyond curiosity. Brautigan's work is jigsaw puzzle art that demands more than close reading it demands an active participation by the reader, a reconstruction of a vision that has been fragmented but warmed by a private poetic sensibility. On first reading Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar, one senses that something extraordinary has happened to the form of the novel, to the intellectual and aesthetic conventions to which we have become accustomed. The Regained Paradise of Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar ![]()
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