Read Online Butterfly in the Typewriter by Cory MacLauchlin - Free Book Online Page A

calling to Christ and professing aloud their faith. But mixed with his appreciation, he showed some disdain for the simplicity of the believers to be swayed by such theatrics, and so, as Thelma says, “they laughed their heads off.”
    As Toole drafted The Neon Bible , he must have recalled Billy Graham. The evangelist in the book who comes to the small Mississippi town appears remarkably similar to how Graham looked in 1954. David, the narrator protagonist, explains his first impressions of the evangelist:
    The first thing I noticed about him, even before his clothes and how skinny he was, were his eyes. They were blue, but a kind of blue I never saw before. It was a clear kind of eye that always looked like it was staring into a bright light without having to squint. His cheeks weren’t full like a boy’s would be, but hung in toward his teeth. You could hardly see his upper lip, not because it was thin, but because he had a long, narrow nose that sort of hung down at the end. He was blond-headed, with his hair combed straight back and hanging on his neck.
    And in the tent the spirits of the townspeople awaken. Even David nearly goes to the altar to profess his faith. The tent bonds the town together. But once it is taken down and the evangelist leaves town, everything begins to crumble. Having lost his father to the war, his Aunt Mae to the wind, and his mother, who died in his arms one night as he wiped the blood from her mouth, David, in the end, defends the family home when the preacher from the local church comes to take his mother to the mental hospital. Unaware of her death, the preacher’s presence threatens to uncover their poor and secretive existence. So as the preacher ascends the stairs, David shoots him in the back and kills him, then flees town. Like Flannery O’Connor, Toole uses violence to twist the plot, moving it from the subdued, coming-of-age story of a Mississippi teenager to the tale of a boy pushed to the brink to defend his mother, resulting in his being ousted from the community he had known all his life.
    While The Neon Bible has become known as a work of juvenilia, an accomplishment in respect to Toole’s age at the time he wrote it, the novel remains a work that demonstrates his keen awareness of character
and dialogue. Kerry Luft, senior editor at the Chicago Tribune , expresses this early talent: “Toole knew that the way to write about complex emotions is to express them simply.” He likely gleaned this style of simplicity from one of his favorite novels at the time, The Catcher in the Rye . But his first novel also appears as a counter principle to Toole’s introduction to verbal expression under the guidance of his mother. Thelma expressed herself in the most florid ways possible. She prided herself on the occasional, elaborate “literary sentence” that she would contribute to her son’s school papers.
    But Toole decided the voice of the narrator in his novel needed to sound like an average teenager of the time. When David explains the experience of being beat up by high school bullies, he does so using the straightforward vocabulary of a sixteen-year-old:
    The first sock came. It was on my head right above my eye, and I began to cry again, only this time harder. They were all on me at once, I thought. I felt myself falling backward, and I landed with them on top of me. My stomach made a sick grinding noise, and I started feeling the vomit climb up into my throat. I was tasting blood on my lips now, and an awful scaredness was creeping from my feet up my legs. I felt the tingling go up till it grabbed me where I really felt it. Then the vomit came, over everything. Me, Bruce, and the other two. They screamed and jumped off me. And I laid there and the sun was hot and there was dust all over me.
    Toole clearly had the ability to describe this moment with more ornamentation, as is evident in his school papers, but he stays true to the