I kinda had writer’s block, so I have posted this essay I wrote for intro to lit­er­a­ture. Sorry about this Pat, I’ll try again tomorrow.

Real­ity is all around us. We are real­ity; the writ­ing of this paper is real­ity as is the story of John Berendt’s “Mid­night in the Gar­den of Good and Evil.” Real­ity is what actu­ally hap­pens in real life and the pre­sen­ta­tion of real­ity is so fine that it sim­ply can­not be made up or fab­ri­cated. What makes Berendt’s pre­sen­ta­tion of his life in Savan­nah, Geor­gia is the skill­ful manip­u­la­tion and place­ment of just the right words to cre­ate a mas­ter­piece that repli­cates real life while main­tain­ing an edge – a curios­ity or hook as it may be. Books that are writ­ten non-fictitiously tend to be bor­ing, rec­ol­lect­ing the events in dull detail and lend­ing no part to action or sus­pense. On the other hand, books that are writ­ten fic­ti­tiously tend to quickly grab the reader’s atten­tion and draw the reader into an elab­o­rate plot where events seems to drop in and occur and just the right moment in time and space to keep the story going and the sus­pense high. Berendt has writ­ten a type of book that com­bines the authen­tic­ity, or real­ity, of a non-fiction and the sus­pense­ful plot and word care­ful word plan­ning of a non-fiction work. Dur­ing the course of this essay, there will sev­eral exam­ples pulled from the book and exam­ined to deter­mine why exactly Berendt’s book reads like a novel.

Not so much an exam­ple as the over­all writ­ing style of the book, Berendt takes advan­tage of writ­ing the story as if he were present at every place and every time – almost like a third per­son nar­ra­tion told from a first per­son point of view. This type of per­spec­tive [first per­son] allows the reader to con­nect per­son­ally with the nar­ra­tor which is a tech­nique often used in nov­els and lends the reader to the idea that they are actu­ally along­side the nar­ra­tor and the action dur­ing the course of the book. Using this type of per­son­al­ized per­spec­tive, Berendt bypasses the ever-present dan­ger of using third per­son point of view: the bore fac­tor. His­tory books are not read as nov­els because they are writ­ten in a third per­son point of view. This alien­ates the reader from the action and by doing that, the reader is uncom­pelled to become involved in the action. Berendt also hur­dles the third per­son point of view by aug­ment­ing the story with rich vocab­u­lary that strength­ens the real­ity aspect of the story while keep­ing the feel of a fic­ti­tious novel intact. This nar­ra­tion mat­ter is one of the major rea­sons why “Mid­night in the Gar­den of Good and Evil” reads like a piece of fiction.

Cer­tainly, not all aspects of Berendt’s book are or can be told in a truth­ful or real­is­tic mat­ter. Many holes (details) had to be filled in order to turn Berendt’s story into a free flow­ing piece of lit­er­a­ture – free from and rip­ples or obstruc­tions that may lead to a reader’s scrutiny of the text. At times, Berendt would often make assump­tions about events that really occurred which he never per­son­ally wit­nessed. Smooth­ing out the story in this fash­ion was per­fectly accept­able in Berendt’s case because the main points and events were still present and kept intact.

As a gen­eral expla­na­tion of how Berendt’s style of writ­ing works, the fol­low­ing is an excerpt from “Mid­night in the Gar­den of Good and Evil;” “The voice came over my shoul­der like a mur­mur­ing breeze. “Oh, don’t do that,” it said. “What­ever you do, don’t do that.”…The man’s face red­dened, as he’d been caught think­ing out loud. It struck me that if either one of us should have been embar­rassed, I was the one.” (Berendt 62). All ele­ments of Berendt’s inge­nious writ­ing style a present in this quote; com­bi­na­tion of third and first per­son, assump­tions of minor details drawn from the larger pic­ture, and s smooth flow­ing intro­duc­tion present in the begin­ning of the chap­ter. Although Berendt may have noted in his travel notes that he was in a drug store, he would have [assumedly] never tran­scribed the man’s speech or that his face red­dened because Berendt wit­nessed the per­son talk­ing to him­self. Another writ­ing trick that Berendt uses is the sub­tle descrip­tions used through­out the book and said trick is present in the above quote while describ­ing how Berendt heard this man – like a mur­mur­ing breeze. By using these writ­ing tech­niques and styles, Berendt is able to cre­ate this illu­sion of a story free of holes, miss­ing descrip­tions, true-to-life description.

Berendt’s assump­tions of what peo­ple say is pretty close to what they might say in real­ity which is one of the rea­sons this book is do intrigu­ing. “But the cow­ard wouldn’t hold still! I blew a hole in the air con­di­tioner.” “You shot him?” Mrs. Carter said, wide-eyed. “I missed.” “How for­tu­nate.”” (198). Extract­ing this kind of dia­logue would be dif­fi­cult for any­one by any means whether it be from mem­ory or from short notes. After liv­ing among other peo­ple for quite some time, an aver­age per­son has a fairly good notion of how peo­ple talk and because of that they are able to deter­mine if the dia­logue is real or phony. To craft this dia­logue, and in mass quan­ti­ties, is quite an amaz­ing feat. Berendt wrote down not what he thought peo­ple said but what they would have actu­ally said. Even if this exchange of words is not word for word from the actual scene, it is still believ­able enough for the reader to take as reality.

Vivid imagery plays a cru­cial role in this book and is used to describe at length any num­ber of scenes to make the reader feel like they are really there. “He put his arms around her and stroked her back with both hands… and he began kiss­ing her breasts while at the same time push­ing her skirt up and pulling down here panties. … She breathed the salty smell of his T-shirt… Their ris­ing body heat enclosed them like a steamy towel.” (132). This scene is def­i­nitely one of the most vivid scenes in the book, most likely due to the inti­macy of the two char­ac­ters engag­ing in sex­ual inter­course in the scene. Berendt’s nar­ra­tion of this event also por­trays the role of sex­u­al­ity in the story not only between these two char­ac­ters but also of the main char­ac­ter, Jim Williams who is a homo­sex­ual her­maph­ro­dite. The use of this vivid imagery allows the reader to essen­tially revisit the scene and go through what hap­pened at that par­tic­u­lar moment in time. Clearly Berendt did not per­son­ally wit­ness this event take place but got the main idea and points from the female in the sit­u­a­tion, Corinne, and filled in the rest with what he thought would have hap­pened. Typ­i­cally, only fic­ti­tious nov­els have this level of detail but Berendt was able to inte­grate his con­trived details with the real main points. Lastly, the imagery of the body heat enclos­ing the cou­ple like a steamy towel is yet another won­der­ful descrip­tion of the scene allow­ing the reader to feel as if they are really at the place in time.

Writ­ten in the style of a novel, read­ers of “Mid­night” will often get so involved in the story that they for­get that that this book is a por­trayal of real events. The knowl­edge that this book is a true story is very impor­tant to the reader because the story will take on dif­fer­ent mean­ings depend­ing on how you per­ceive the events; as real or con­trived. Berendt real­izes this and often con­ducts “real­ity checks” that alert the reader that this book is non-fiction. “Well, it looks like you’ll have a happy end­ing for your book…” (Berendt 377). This notion about Berendt writ­ing a book through­out the story is impor­tant for the read­ers to know because with­out it, read­ers will assume that this work of lit­er­a­ture is fic­tion instead of non-fiction because of his pre­sen­ta­tion of reality.

Berendt has sim­ply done an amaz­ing job pre­sent­ing his story as a full-fledged book with changes of scene, and ref­er­ence to events that he did not actu­ally see take place. His writ­ing style allows the reader to read his book with­out get­ting bored because of his unique nar­ra­tive style, cap­ti­vat­ing ver­biage, and descrip­tive scenes. The way Berendt fills in the gaps in his story make the reader feel like they are read­ing a novel but in fact they are wit­ness­ing a true story from basi­cally a third per­son view just at many novel con­tain to explain dif­fer­ent aspects of the char­ac­ters and essen­tial scenes needed to tell this won­der­ful story.

Hope you enjoyed the essay. If you want, you can leave comments/grammatical fixes/criticisms below. Thanks and look for­ward to another post tomorrow.