From: Floyd Scarabelli
Category: Amis
Date: 8/4/99
Time: 8:59:57 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.6
There is a song lyric called *The Boxer*. Written by Paul Simon, who's even shorter than Amis. Most of *The Boxer* is a first-person narrative. It's a confession of despair & self-pity spoken by a washed-up loser in the entertainment business: "I have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises. All lies and jests. Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." But the final part of *The Boxer* shifts into a third-person narrative: "In the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade. And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down and cut him till he cried out, in his anger and his shame: 'I am leaving, I am leaving.' But the fighter still remains."
The narrational shift in *The Boxer* could possibly be interpreted as a psychological defense-mechanism on the part of the narrator. The boxer's defeat is too painful for the boxer to narrate in the first-person. So he objectifies himself with a third-person perspective in order to gain the necessary distance from himself. That technique was also used by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges said to Paul Theroux: "When something bad is done to me, I pretend that it happened a long time ago, to someone else."
My favorite Martin Amis joke does the opposite narrative trick. It goes from third-person to first-person. *The Information* begins with an impersonal third-person narration. But on page 43 (American version) or page 63 (limebag version), Amis-the-narrator manifests himself. He materializes in a playground. Probably a playground just like the one in a Philip Larkin poem called *Afternoons*, where "something is pushing them to the side of their own lives". Amis sees a boy directing hand gestures at Amis. Amis misinterprets the boy's gestures as the sign language of a deaf person. But the boy is simply spelling out his name with his fingers. So Amis says: "how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I don't know *anything*? When I can't read childish capitals in the apologetic fog." It's one of those self-referential jokes. It's a confession of cluelessness. Just as *Night Train* is a confession of cluelessness.