Writings

Donald Barthelme’s Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby explores the relationship between language and morality through an unnamed narrator, who reports the proceedings of a plan to hang a friend, Colby, for an unspecified transgression. The first person narrative point-of-view erases moral consideration while the use of active voice unambiguously records each completed act. The use of reported speech and modal verbs, in particular, suggests a gap between grammatical and actual agency. In so doing, the narrator creates a moral vacuum that the reader must reckon with. Through narrative POV and active voice, the text performs amorality that forces readers to resolve the moral quandary surrounding Colby’s hanging by themselves.

The text creates a bureaucratic register through a limited first-person perspective that collapses every character’s perspective into a singular reportage. This forces readers to look for moral cues that never arrive. Throughout the excerpt, the narrator reports how “I thought…”, “Tomas…reminded…”, “Victor… noted that…” and so on. This reportage strips the narration of emotional affect and erases the moral consideration usually associated with such violent acts. In so doing, the text subtly sets up the reader to be aware of a moral gap. Considering Colby is the narrator’s friend, the juxtaposition between his intimate status and the text’s minutes-like register makes this gap doubly unsettling. Beyond the emotionally blunt interiority, the narrator’s perspective centres on “drinks, invitations, musicians”, “strictly traditional” choice of tree, and “threat of rain”. The only emotions of Howard replying “rather sharply” or Tomas expressing “disgust” is in relation to complications to the planned hanging. This foregrounds the importance of the planning surrounding the hanging more so than the morality behind the violent act. The importance accorded to questions of aesthetics, logistics and environmental obstacles suggests that the question of morality is moot when access to other characters’ interiority is filtered through a single narrator’s lens. Taken together, the limited point of view aggregates the characters’ foci, accentuates the conspicuous absence of morality and engineers a situation where readers search for moral resolution only to realise that no such consideration exists.

Using constructions of possibility and intention within the active voice perpetually defers the hanging and its attendant moral reckoning simultaneously. Throughout the excerpt, the active voice grants agency such that “I also thought four hundred dollars… was a bit steep”, “Tomas…had been sketching”, “Victor…liked the idea…but noted that…” and so on. However, the characters only complete actions insofar as they are related to opinions and perspectives on the plan to hang Colby. The past perfect continuous of “had been sketching” suggests a demarcation of timeframe for discussion – the narrator is unambiguous about discussing the specifics of planning and actions that predate it (such as sketching gibbets), but never the hanging itself. This semantic manoeuvre constrains the reader into a limited time span in which they are forced to revolve around the same peripheral considerations of aesthetics and logistics. In addition, the use of dynamic modality accentuates the abstract quality of the hanging – “the trees would be in glorious leaf”, “we would have to hold it some distance…”, “he could round up enough limousines” and so on. Such abstractions further give a sense of approaching the actual hanging but never arriving at it. A reader who ordinarily expects the text to perform moral judgment instead encounters an ironic subordination of the hanging into subtext. Meanwhile, its managerial aspects are foregrounded, accentuating their unease and compelling them to supply their own moral answer.

In tandem, the text’s narrative point of view and active voice reveal language as a tool of recordkeeping rather than moral deliberation by underscoring the gap between grammatical and actual agency. As with the other characters, Colby is given grammatical agency as he can appeal to a sense of common decency – “everybody went too far, sometimes and weren’t we being a bit Draconian”. Yet, the narrative voice makes it clear that only characters other than Colby possess both grammatical and actual agency. Howard shuts Colby down by saying “all that had already been discussed” and reduced his options to “gibbet or tree”. Colby’s attempt to expand this binary and suggest “a firing squad” is also refused on the grounds of it being “an ego trip…with unnecessary theatrics”, forcing him to “take the tree”. This disconnect works on two levels. First, the active voice grants Colby grammatical agency but the narrative voice makes it clear that he is in fact powerless. Second, the narrative voice then subsumes Colby as part of the planning that must be managed with constraints in the same way the characters plan for the logistics of orchestral music. Colby’s eventual decision to “take the tree” is an act of submission and here, even his grammatical agency records his subsumption into procedural planning. Morality is thus translated into procedure through language that records what is said and done, but not why. When language proceduralises the morality of violence and denies any reckoning with it, readers recognise the absurd irony – language, which ostensibly facilitates deliberation, becomes the tool with which to foreclose it; the only choice available is to confront this irony and resolve it themselves. Synthesising thus, the extract uses the limited first-person perspective and active voice to proceduralise violence and reframe it in managerial terms, thereby producing an amoral situation that is never resolved. In so doing, the text also withholds judgement on matters of morality and moves the reader towards a resolution of their own choosing – whether it be to express revulsion, indifference or hearty laughter. That said, the analysis of narrative point of view and active voice was limited only to a short extract. Were it extended to the ending where Colby is summarily hanged, an exploration of how voice and perspective can continue to withhold moral judgement while acknowledging the completion of a violent act may yield new insights.