You really don't want to get me started about this, because I can go for weeks, BUT.
VG is in many ways a rewrite of Citizen Kane, and shares its odd structure--meeting the hospitalized manager in wheelchair, the wife, other characters, and then the wife again (though in VG, the second "wife' sequence is with Kurt rather than going back to the actual wife, which is interesting). But it's a pomo Kane--while Kane suggests that there was an answer to the question "Who was Kane?"--i.e. Rosebud; the story of Rosebud, while never discovered, exists and explains Kane's fuckedupness pretty damn well--in VG, there really IS no answer as to "what happened to Brian Slade"--I mean, okay, yes, he became TS, but that isn't the same kind of explanation: why did he change? Because he did, is all; because people do. The story ends up not caring much about what happened to BS, and becomes more about what BS *meant* to our hero, A.
no subject
VG is in many ways a rewrite of Citizen Kane, and shares its odd structure--meeting the hospitalized manager in wheelchair, the wife, other characters, and then the wife again (though in VG, the second "wife' sequence is with Kurt rather than going back to the actual wife, which is interesting). But it's a pomo Kane--while Kane suggests that there was an answer to the question "Who was Kane?"--i.e. Rosebud; the story of Rosebud, while never discovered, exists and explains Kane's fuckedupness pretty damn well--in VG, there really IS no answer as to "what happened to Brian Slade"--I mean, okay, yes, he became TS, but that isn't the same kind of explanation: why did he change? Because he did, is all; because people do. The story ends up not caring much about what happened to BS, and becomes more about what BS *meant* to our hero, A.