Response to "Off"

Aimee Bender’s “Off” makes a strong case for unusual narrators—though the protagonist possesses incredible malice, her thoughts are disordered enough and her flashes of humanity frequent enough that the reader isn’t completely disgusted.  Everything she does is contradictory—she seems to be genuinely fond of Adam, as she says “I remember just what’s it’s like and I am suddenly feeling like I miss him and I am remembering everything of what it’s like to be with him.” However, she abandons him so she can complete her kissing trifecta, and when someone walks in on her kissing him, she is relieved they do not know her only because it would interfere with her acquisition of a black-haired man.

                The narrator is not particularly reliable, mainly because she claims knowledge of things she has no way of knowing. She assumes that Adam feels the same as her in the bathroom, for example, and thinks that everyone believes her when she says she only stole the coats because she was drunk. Of course, if she is drunk, she certainly would not admit it, regardless of the number of coffee mugs of “affordable-yet-delicious wine” she consumes.  Also, she feels superior to everyone in the party, but by her own description, she is looking a little strange, since she is wearing a silver dress and drinking wine out of a coffee mug while everyone around her is wearing T-Shirts and jeans.

There are only a few lines of dialogue in the entire story, which is interesting. Dialogue would normally allow the reader to make their own judgments about the other characters, particularly in a present tense story like this, where the reader knows the story is not being recounted. However, the small amount of dialogue constrains the reader to view the world almost entirely from the narrator’s eyes.