This bit takes place roughly ten years after the last chapter of the book; and again, he’s presumably drunk, driving through the villages littering England. To summarize what happens, he nearly slams into a stone fountain, but as the universe would have it, he survives through a freak occurrence. But all along throughout this incident, he welcomed the possibility of death, and egged fate on:
As the fountain grew larger I felt myself relax. I leaned toward the door. Let it come. Let it come as hard and as fast as it can. Touch the wheel, make an adjustment so it will strike right beside me. Here it comes! Here it comes! (Conroy, p. 284).
Conroy, despite being in a presumably perilous predicament, remains in a tone that mocks death. He toys with fate, and despite surviving the ordeal, he laughs afterwards. To me, this isn’t Conroy having a fit of nervous laughter, or anything of the sort, but the exact opposite; he shows that he believes that no matter what he does, he’s invincible. That he’s without consequence. Again, it’s his unconscious admittance to his biggest downfall, which has plagued him throughout his memoir. This nearly fatal event is comparable to another time in Conroy’s life when he got “caught up in the…show more content…
Really, there’s no reason to even include these events in the novel, aside from creating a juxtaposition between his past and current self. However, these passages have somewhat of an allegorical quality to them. Regarding the prologue, it was used to create an image of Frank Conroy that the reader would be able to understand; it was a way to introduce his flaws immediately, so the audience would understand where they came from as they read the memoir itself. The epilogue is much more dramatic, in a sense. Its tone is almost manic, and seems to be the “this is what I’ve become” of the novel. His syntax has changed to where it seems like the Frank Conroy you met in the prologue has changed as you read the novel, and this is the
Aug 12, 2015 'Stop-Time' tells the story of Frank Conroy's first eighteen years of life, a life marked by the ordinary rather than the lurid or unseemly. But the ordinariness of the life is elevated by the dreamlike, sensitive, asynchronous wonder of Conroy's writing. ‘‘Stop-time’’ is a memoir which was written by an American author by the name; Frank Conroy. The book tells Conroy’s childhood experiences while growing up between Florida and New York was published in 1967. Conroy’s story can be related to contemporary times where thousands of American children go through a lot of emotional turmoil.
Body And Soul Frank Conroy
In his book, Frank Conroy describes a series of events that led him to become an adult. Right from the start, he mentions the fact that he lost his father at a very young age (Conroy 5). Perhaps, if this happened later, at the time when the author was a grown-up, this fact would not influence him that much.
- A strong, stoical memoir, Stop-Time, published in 1967, recounts Conroy’s childhood and adolescence placed inside two narrow contemporary frames: accounts of reckless to the point of suicide/homicide driving from London to the countryside.
- Stop -Time Frank Conroy The Viking Press ISBN: It is the human that is the alien, The human that has no cousin in the moon. It is the human that demands his speech From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.
Stop Time is a disjointed memoir, essentially a collection of reminiscences, held together by the thread of the author’s life. Frank Conroy’s father’s was institutionalized for mental illness, and this fact provides the foundation pattern of Conroy’s life: shaky finances, rootlessness, lonliness, and the contradictory impulse to disappear. The title, Stop Time, is a jazz reference, and it is an apt one. A band plays a pattern of chords on the downbeat and third measures while one musician riffs through the chords and intervening silences, or stops. Conroy’s solo life performance is comprised of adventures, second-hand crises, and a range of awakenings set against conditions that are beyond a boy’s control. In the “stops” Conroy portrays the mind of the boy he had been, recording the motion as the boy rolls through the silences and careens off of people and events.
“I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.” – John Coltrane
The author takes an occasional run well outside (another jazz term) the roughly chronological progression of his stories. Free of chronology, Conroy composes by juxtapositions. He uses disperate moments from his life to create sense of aching dislocation. The most striking of these is found in chapter twelve. At the close of the preceding chapter Frank is a fifteen year old boy sleeping under a tree in Delaware. When chapter twelve opens we have Frank as “a very young boy (177)” accompanying his mother’s housekeeper to her home in Harlem for the night. A page and a half further, we find him “Five years later, in Florida, up a tree.” Three paragraphs on we have landed, “ten miles south of London at four in the morning,” where he is driving drunk. This one-page series of digressions closes this way: The drunken noise of my mind suddenly stops as an extraordinary feeling comes over me. I’m not in the car at all! I’m under the tree in Delaware! One page later we are back where we left off at the close of chapter eleven. It reads like madness, which is an inescapable motif in Conroy’s memoir. We see it represented by his father, his mother’s time working at a state mental institution, an emotionally unstable boarder, and finally his sister. The dislocated chronology reads a bit like a fever dream, taking the reader from roughly the middle of the book to points from early in the author’s life to the very last page of this story’s epilogue. The effect is disorienting, and leaves us wondering how to interpret such a telling. Another jazz reference is called to mind. Free. It’s the word for a jazz musician’s abandonment of constraints. Meter, key and structure yield to whimsy and passion in order to created a singular and fleeting idiom. A change in consciousness is possible outside the accepted constraints of any form.
The quality of Conroy’s writing that stays with the reader is his attention to the particular. Some of the most remarkable passages in Stop Time are those that reveal his state of mind at various points in his life. Even the emotionally neutral description of falling asleep on the job stand out for its precision and originality.
Frank Conroy Stop Time Quotes
The image of the cat . . . is a signal to the mind to come to rest. There is no immediate sense of beauty, only the act of seeing. A scanning mechanism in the brain locks in a cycle of cat.Without an ego to break the equipoise one’s mind is like an electirc motor with the poles perfectly balanced at positive and negative (139).
The comparison of the mind with an electric motor has been done before, but a mind beyond sense and in balance, though ready, like a motor without direction –this is a first, and it encourages a hightened awareness. Ramdisk for mac.
Ts3 for mac. “It’s the hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: you feel this, you play this.” – Ornette Coleman
When Conroy captures a state of mind he creates a sense of distance from the scenes’ event and the feelings. The scene and the action are stopped so that we pull the mind out by its roots and examine it outside of its context.
Frank Conroy Memoir
Sadness crept over me—a sadness I didn’t question, a sadness so profound I understood it could not have come from life, or any source within my conceptual scope, but instead seeped into me from the very air, from the whole extant universe in which I was less than a speck, sadness that was not emotion but the awareness of vast empinesses (164). Office 2011 for mac rutracker.
Stop Time Frank Conroy Quotes
This story and the author’s mind begin to appear as two separate things that merely interact. The result is a tone of objectivity from which sadness is a thing to be studied and considered dispassionately–and the book has been praised for the author’s lack of self pity. In the final chapters the young Conroy takes firm steps onto a conventional path: first love, college acceptance, and, in a chapter entitled “Unambiguous Events,” that tells of his arrival for freshman year. In a mode of writing that owes much to solidy avant garde jazz sensibilities, Conroy provides a one page epilogue to sound a dischordant final blast. We are returned to his intoxicated drive ten miles south of London at a time that is ten years after starting college. Following a miraculous spin-out he climbs from the car and vomits into a fountain. “My throat burning with bile, I started to laugh (284)”. It’s a jangling coda that recalls the motif of madness and the sense of a life untethered in place or time.