The Check Mark

I was feeling a little ambitious and was trying to finish the book before I wrote this post, but due to my spontaneous napping that this book is inducing, I still have but a few pages to go. I decided to go by Suzanna’s advice and skip straight to the end to read Pelafina’s  letters to her son, Johnny, before continuing to read further.  These letters shed light on his past and certainly helps me with understanding his character better.  Aside from the emotional and psychological baggage that must have come along the broken home and the physical abuse he had to endure as a child, which I don’t feel like delving into, we also learn about his intelligence and talent with words that is reflected in his mother’s reaction to his writing.  Yet, reading through the letters did not give me the satisfaction I needed because there is always the question of credibility that we all seem to enjoy pondering upon.  We learn about this abuse as a child by his foster parent through his mother’s response when he tells her in one of his letters, as well as in his own narration, but are we expected to necessarily believe what he tells his mother and his reader? The more I read the more it seems like he intentionally wants his reader to be skeptical of his stories, like in page 108 when he tells his story about being hit by a truck and immediately negates it detail by detail.  And I know I’m going too far with this, but could the whole pack of letters be another one of the fictional texts in the book that is claimed to exist?  Another thing that the letters helped me notice is the check sign at the bottom right of page 97.  In the letters we learn that Pelafina tries to communicate in secrecy with Johnny by asking him to sign a check at the bottom right to confirm that he has read her letters, and so its appearance in this page raises some questions about why it’s there.  I believe it bares some relation to the quote taken from the OED, which his mother supposedly gave him to encourage his writing (sorry, but everything in this book I am forced to take as a supposition) of the definition of SOS that opens that chapter, which, correspondingly, is another signal used for communication.  Is he using this method to manifest communication with someone? Who may that be and why?  I could be imagining this but I think someone suggested in the blog that Johnny’s mother could be the ultimate narrator of this book.  If we look at it that way then do we take it as an indication of her role as narrator? It is also possible that this check mark carries no significance except that it is used to put off the readers and mess with their heads at 5 in the morning.  It could be another one of those red herrings that we’ve been getting a lot of in these postmodern texts.