China, IL, I would like to hear more about Zampano and Johnny’s mother being the same. What did you talk about in your class? I agree with most of the contributors here that there is a lot of evidence in favor of Zampano and Johnny being the same person, although even the examples themselves (including mine, below) don’t really give much away as a result of the complicated narrative structure.
In my class, my professor draws a diagram every day with concentric circles, the space between each pair of circles representing a different narrator dictating the actions of the narrator within his narrative, and so on. For example, The Navidson Record is in the center, Zampano encircles The N. R. , Zampano’s reading assistants/volunteers encircle Zampano, Truant encircles Zampano’s readers, and the Editors encircle Truant. This doesn’t even include Johnny’s mother, another potential author.
To make a long story very short, anybody could have written anything, and the “ errors” and “ typos” don’t help—they make it even more confusing. Take for instance page 320. Near the top, in the second paragraph, Zampano writes, “ Regrettably, Tom fails to stop at a sip. A few hours later he has finished off the whole fifth as well as half a bottle of wine. He might have spent all night drinking had exhaustion not caught up with me. ” This should read “ caught up with him” but instead suddenly switches to the first person.
This could mean several things: 1) Zampano made a Freudian slip and referred to himself here even though he didn’t drink 2) Johnny has been writing the Navidson Record all along and slipped (it would make more sense since he, like Tom, depends on drugs and alcohol to function) 3) Johnny did it intentionally just to screw with us 4) (and this is a stretch) Maybe they’re Navidson’s words. If Navidson was real, it would make sense that he would make an error because the subject of Tom is so painful to him What do other people think?
