Emergency Response

The dispassionate narrator of “Emergency” emphasizes the strangeness of Georgie, mainly because he is the only person who can pierce the narrator’s fugue. When Terrence comes into the hospital with a weapon protruding from his eye, the narrator doesn’t comment on it. The dialogue conveys everything readers need to know, but the narrator himself says little. However, only a page prior, when Georgie is weeping and mopping up invisible blood, the narrator compares his posture to that of “a child soiling its diapers”. Here, Georgie is a pitiable figure. At the end of the story, the narrator notes that “Georgie had said something that had suddenly and completely explained the difference between us.” He is making profound insights into his and Georgie’s personalities when he otherwise withholds his judgment on almost everything else.

Johnson uses an interesting confluence of setting and character. The narrator is so distant because working in a hospital has seared away empathy and critical faculties. What’s left is numbed by drugs, which are available to the narrator because of where he works. People are not affected only by the people they are with, but by where they are.

Johnson also makes good use of the grotesque. A fair amount of imagery in “Emergency” is out and out revolting. Georgie looks like he is defecating himself early in the story. A man enters the emergency room with a knife running through his eye and into his brain. Georgie runs over a rabbit, then dismembers it and pulls underdeveloped fetuses out of its womb. All of these are gruesome, but they are detailed. The hospital is vaguely described, so when  Johnsons provides pockets of gore-spattered significance , they are all the more memorable. Terrence is not one of many imperiled victims. He is wheeled around in what seems to be an almost empty hospital. Georgie’s attempted rescue of the fetal rabbits takes place on a road barren of details, save for alarmed passers-by. The relative detail of these events, as well as their shocking nature, underscore their importance.